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...
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...
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...
How It Feels to Be Free
Raquel Salas Rivera and Carina del Valle Schorske discuss Latinx poetics and what it means to be a Puerto Rican poet and translator after the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
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...
Know Your Product
...product can we recognize ourselves as "genuinely" real, given the amount of attention and effort collectively directed at enchanting and foregrounding products within a consumer-capitalist culture. We are ideologically trained,...
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...
The White Women of Empire
...de-sexualized barbarians whose country we must infiltrate and dominate to protect our citizens from current danger and our culture from future threat. But it is clear that the helpless and/or...
The Carceral State
...you know, there are also chapters of Critical Resistance in Los Angeles and Oakland that continue to push toward abolition in a culture where compromise is often the most we...
Precarity and "affective resistance"
...networks). I thought then that we would experience any attempt to carry us back to the values pre-market culture as unfreedom, the loss of possibilities, despite the ways in which...
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,...
Gut of the Quantifier
...practice eludes codification, it provides a living resource for the preservation of oral culture ... Senior executives, because of the authority they enjoy, have been able to preserve the orality...
The Clock Inside Us
...body and embed it within the culture of busyness. If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure...
Beauty Blogosphere 6.14.13
...am not the culture of Lululemon. Everyone is the culture of Lululemon." (Ayn Rand would be so disappointed!) Who will succeed her is anyone's guess; Forbes predicts Lululemon will make...
First-Person Corporate
...novels Michaels regards as paradigmatically neoliberal in their themes and conceits. , he also detects in the culture itself. He writes in "What Matters," an August 2009 piece for The...