A Very Brief History of Viking Victuals
...a source of pride. Publications on Old Norse culture started appearing as early as the 16th century. It all started in 1867, when excavators digging in a burial mound on...
A History of Like
...or "I agree," or "This is awesome"? At first it seems like one of those accidents of popular culture, where an arbitrary boardroom decision eventually dictates our everyday language. In...
Vol. 22 Editors' Note: Self-Help
...evils of digital culture. Jesse Barron’s “Instructions For Young Manhood” gives some helpful advice to young dudes on how to behave in the gym, tracing the links between the cult...
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...
The Year of Magical Thinking
Viral manifestation logics imagine that everyone else is an NPC
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.”...
Self-Help
...about the growing “digital detox” movement, which is more about policing our desire for autonomy than protecting ourselves from the evils of digital culture. Jesse Barron’s “Instructions For Young Manhood”...
White Bodies, Black Faces
...disaster for American politics and culture. But there are all these other people who are left with really profound questions about where we’re going as a country, about solidarity. Some...
Turtles from the Shells
...journey” may have been an appropriate structure for George Lucas’s Star Wars or Steve Case’s AOL business plan, but it was no longer an appropriate map for a culture that...
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...
Sorry Not Sorry
...came to adjudicate his crimes. Who will question Oprah, the billionaire who broadcasts poor people’s slobbering and screaming for her handouts, who christens the literature of our narcissistic culture of...
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...
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 Myth of Cyberspace
...place shared by multiple disembodied minds. However, the very same phrase also aptly describes the role that the concept of cyberspace has now come to occupy in contemporary culture. What...
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,...
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...