Death Dreams
...of our craven soullessness. “Consciously or not, Houellebecq’s writing exhibits the schizophrenic pull of consumption culture,” Jeffery writes, “how unreal it seems and yet how enmeshed in it we remain.”...
Yer Cheatin' Heart: Beauty and Infidelity
...was surprised by the findings of this study at first. On the surface, our culture tends to equate beauty with sex appeal more than it connects beauty and lovability. (The...
Appetite for Destruction
...is what best channels the substance of American culture, its mediated violence, into a single ritual. It systematizes technology, brute force, and drama into an event capable of creating beauty,...
Wild Wild East
...as two other Worlds’ Fairs). In various popular culture depictions, he is at once lauded for his fierce commitment to defending the freedom of his people and reviled for his...
Nerd Sex Symbol Redux
...in order to be seen as “one of us” by nerd culture at large. It’s not just McKellar’s math skills; it’s her specific brand of appeal that puts her in...
Shame: A Durkheimian Take
...read, otherwise I'm just another selfish Tory). Instead, he just appears utterly stuck with himself. In these respects, Brandon's character is entirely at odds with the therapy culture of New...
Festival Life
...also be seen as a symptom of the halcyon days of economic collapse. The shopping mall as site zombified consumer culture has been a trope in popular cinema as long...
Called to Account
...La Berge, who are making crucial interventions about how social relations and culture are shaped by financialization. There’s a lot of work out there about neoliberal discipline and how discourses...
Remains of the Day
...state that the face is a redundancy in Western capitalist culture. 14. Fame is said to have a price, but fame is all price. The cost of human cost. 15....
Beside the Point: Appearance Anxiety in Eating Disorders
...of TV in Fiji was probably a pretty big fucking deal and that maybe Baywatch was less of a culprit than the shifting notions of culture, family, leisure, and communication....
No Money in Movies
...money, many of these artists are now faced with shrinking budgets and crowded release windows, which makes their work smaller in scale and less relevant to the culture at large....
Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child
Left theory’s response to the feminization of labor has been to cry for mommy
Eric's Trip
...hot air and opacity, contributing to a general impoverishment of British political culture. His polemic is censorious yet witty, offsetting a surly, jaded disaffection — the man, one feels, has...
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
The Unfuckables
...possible for the hissing girls to cloak it in something political. Something about ‘beauty standards,’ maybe. Or ‘raunch culture.’ ” Fey and company responded to this vein of "girl-on-girl crime"...
Gay Life Against Marriage
...Sullivans of the gay community has been successful. They profit from having denigrated the massively innovative public sex culture, which was the social basis of gay politics, as unthinking promiscuity...