Vol. 19 Editors' Note: "Art"
...development in culture and society, posing new questions—or, let’s face it, the same old questions—as to where the work resides and how we should look at it. Parker Ito’s America...
Sunday Reading
...associated with their gang moniker? It will be located within their cellular phones." Trayvon Martin, a victim in the NRA's culture war A Miracle in Colonel Sanders' Colon Jazz and...
The Primitive Accumulation of Cool
...express our uniqueness through the material culture we assembled for ourselves. Without consumer goods, our true self would rest dormant within us, untouched by the desire that could vivify it....
Open Secrets: Literature as Gossip in the Digital Age
...quickly became famous for sharing their most intimate secrets, for getting metaphorically naked in public. Confessional literature is by no means new. In The Culture of Narcissism, for instance, Christopher...
No Accidents, Comrade
...increasingly crowd out the chance new discoveries will be made. Narratives using chance in American culture — the rags-to-riches story, or immigrant emigration story lines — are so prominent, they...
Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton
...it's a huge part of their labor's marketability. And in a culture where most traits are deemed heritable, like property, great effort must be made to stop the communicability of...
View From Nowhere
...sure. In contemporary culture, Big Data promises this relief. As the name suggests, Big Data is about size. Many proponents of Big Data claim that massive databases can reveal a...
Beauty Blogosphere 4.23.12
...inherent licentiousness, it only makes sense for modesty bloggers to apply "modesty" judiciously—but the contradiction is undeniable. Our culture's definition of "modesty" is tricky indeed (note how it's never applied...
Wordly Treasures
...advanced capitalist societies and hegemonic consumer culture. The loss of beauty and knowledge from the world appears as a compelling argument for language preservation and revitalization, and it is inspiring...
Kenya's Security Act: Everyday Life
...plan how to raise more funding to generate more documents. Radical Culture Spaces for radical culture will have to be fostered—spaces where the imagination can travel beyond what the state...
The Semiautobiographers
...culture. Against these obedient arcs, a little narrative graffiti is more than welcome. New Narrative and its daughters refuse the old dictate that women be demure and follow the rules,...
Reading Like a Loser
...is to see how politics can be “a species-changing practice.” What’s more, to extend the limits of society is also to stretch those of culture. For Bull, the cultural counterpart...
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.”...
Arguing the Web (3): Post-Text
...culture of self-centered, distracted readers who forgot the MLA guidelines for correct citation. The real interest lies in criticism about the growing culture of subjectivity that puts feelings before facts,...
War Comes Home for Dinner
...of a culture of its own, for now it still takes us out of the ones we belong to. Sharing recipes, cooking meals with family, meeting friends at a favorite...
Memory and Preservation
...was already frayed and past any possible human repair. In these futures, we lose past and present. The inhabitants of “Imaginum” therefore take steps to preserve and protect culture,...