The Year of Magical Thinking
Viral manifestation logics imagine that everyone else is an NPC
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...
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.”...
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...
Coming Out of the Coffin
...culture. The British public's fascination with details of Wilde's trials resulted in a broad condemnation of his character. Even in homosexual circles, Wilde was persona non grata for the rest...
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...
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...
Editors' Note, Vol. 34: California
...culture. Holding down the fort are drag culture’s estranged sellout stepchildren: The Real Housewives. The suburban realness of reality television reveals even hetero designs like master-planned subdivisions as forms of...
Fifty Shades of Yellow
...integration into the culture industry’s established circuits of value. The term “tinhat” originated in the stereotype of conspiracy theorists blocking out foreign, telepathic transmissions to their brains by wearing tinfoil...
Holy Land
...relevant, innovative, and progressive. Simultaneously, Israel’s neighbors (and the Palestinians it controls) are positioned as, at best, out of touch with liberal transnational culture and, at worst, undeveloped and reactionary....
Soft Rebellion
...the West understands it, did not exist as a concept in Chinese culture until Han Han’s generation discovered it. And like their foreign counterparts, they find it an endlessly renewable...
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,...
Stone-Age Nostalgia
...our ingredients and culture, hoping to rediscover our history and shape our future.” The Fäviken website also draws attention to its use of methods of food preparation (drying, salting, pickling,...
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...
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...