Unfit for Consumption
...used to viewing women in their underwear as complete human beings. Thinx ads, 2015 The Thinx ads disrupt this view of scantily clad women by emphasizing the visceral rather than...
Sex Appeal, Beauty, and Normalcy: Rachel Hills' "The Sex Myth"
...confident in their appeal. Meanwhile, the actual route to confidence about one’s sex appeal—having positive early sexual experiences—remains unconsidered in the culture at large, almost shooed aside in favor of...
And Other Weary Geographies
...his half-composed, half-improvised delivery on one of the translated poems. An evening of reading and music based on travel, anti-travel, epistles, history, and other weary geographies. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi will...
Sunday Reading
...from Java Hand Gestures in Buddhist Art Marcus du Sautoy on mathematics and music Telegraphs and Typewriters: The Impact of Technology on Bookkeeping at Bushire Kafka’s Tanks: an Early US...
Writing a bodaboda to Rideavism
...the work of a festival to harmonize those dissonances or to making music out of the cacophony? Maybe those gaps and surpluses are the point. Why else bring a group...
Ramadan Diaries, Day Four
...of the Old Wild West," and the erasure of Black outlawry from popular culture and American mythology. I don't believe in coincidence, and my mind ponders how many more cowboy...
You are totally unreliable Twitter
...irritated that I tweet about rape culture; if you follow me because we went to school together, all sorts of things I tweet about may surprise you. In other words,...
Pryor Restraint
...had become too entrenched in our culture to make out. Black American movie stardom existed before Richard Pryor, flourished even, but through the lens of his arc from ace comic...
Presumed conspicuous
...culture (necessitated by grow-at-all-costs capitalism) and its promises of social fluidity, the boundaries of social caste are maintained less through tradition and bloodlines and such but through appropriately staged taste...
Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs
...indeed, meme culture (including but not limited to YouTube parody, stock photo art, cut-ups and image macros) can be seen as the user asserting a subjectivity that exists and thrives...
Sunday Reading
...Battle of Algiers Sterilizing the Bible The history of the Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice Persian influences on Southeast Asian Islamic culture The female majlis painters of 'Asir province in...
Sowing Scarcity
...surpasses capitalist directed wage labor. This is late capitalism’s inverted world, where business and government treat nature as infinite but strictly ration culture. Thus does capitalism, billed in every economics...
The Scapegoating Machine
...secular governance with the decline of the sacred as an organizing principle of culture; but he also detects the residues of sacrificial religion everywhere, especially in the regular resurgence of...
The Revolution Goes Kablooie
...culture. You might as well call it anti-Friedmanism or anti-Gladwellism, because at its best, critical theory opposes reduction and teaches us that sexual preference isn’t an either-or toggle between straight...
Value-seeking surveillance and The Hunger Games
...state makes that entertainment. In our world, the culture industry alone used to turn that stuff out -- ironically enough, The Hunger Games phenomenon is exactly this sort of entertainment...
Fires of Resistance
...collective actions against empire. Indigenous rage then is, quite literally, grounded in the resurgence of Indigenous life and derived from a shared love of place, land, culture, and nation. “Place”,...