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...
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,...
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....
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...
Sleepwalking Through the Ruins
...the terrain of Signs and Machines, which begins in the deep canyon of subject formation and wends its way over the darkling plain of late-capitalist culture before arriving at the...
Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!
An excerpt
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"...
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...
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...
Do the Robot
...through warm service, "hiring for attitude and training for skill." The authors of the HBR article note that the company "doesn’t lack for press about its positive organizational culture and...
Beauty Blogosphere 11.16.12
...of gay (male) culture with fashion (female-ish) culture means that it can be mighty easy for gay men to cross lines of objectification and harassment, mistakenly thinking that because they're...
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...