Closing the Loop
...culture media platforms, Feminism with a capital F began largely to overtake the other causes that the selfie politic had previously championed. What remains, in 2016, is a political and...
Soundtracks for Virtual War
...head and I was in the grid. But in retrospect, does the lack of soundtrack make it any less queasy, in that the presence of music would have made it...
EMP Pop Conference @ NYU 4/18-19
...The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and the Department of Performance studies at NYU's Tisch School of Arts are proud producers of the 2013 EMP Pop Music...
Why Do Stars Love the Stars?
...Celebrities and their astrologists practice an ancient psychological form of art. A few weeks ago I was invited to do astrology readings backstage at the American Music Awards in...
Drones are Paranoid Androids
...to the idle or lazy male honeybee, but it is never stupid. This culture doesn't typically associate lazy or drunk workers with intelligence, if the singular place of Homer Simpson...
"Flowers in the Attic" Is the Best Book Ever* And Here Is Why
...survivors of coercive incest convince themselves that their abuse is quasi-consensual, as a survival tactic.) I agree, at least in the sense that popular culture is a part of rape...
Woman With a Weapon-Camera
On the work of Sarah Maldoror
Swarovski Kristallnacht
...however small, to align yourself with a certain ideology, culture, community. There is no opting out of getting dressed. But in our post–“Punk: Chaos to Couture” reality, it appears as...
The Flies That Bind
...of the ghetto." The child and the corpse are gathered. And opposite them, at the antipode of the human alive or dead, trash itself walks, all across culture, enmonstered. This...
The Enduring Popularity of the Suntan
...of material luxury, a tan represents that we have the luxury to be connected to both nature and culture simultaneously. Tourism boards use tanning in their materials: “The bourgeois on...
No SWAT Zone
Resisting police militarization under Trump.
The Acquisitive Gaze
...novelist Henry James, of all things, Jean-Christophe Agnew argues that the consumerist culture emerging in James's time was a "world constructed by and for a consuming vision," an "imagined world...
Vernacular Criticism
...govern choices between the goods of legitimate culture cannot be fully understood … unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is reinserted into ‘culture’ in the broad,...
Why are we still talking about the “naughty nurse”?
...the 20th. Second, they are even more surprised that the history of nursing is much more complicated than one might imagine given depictions of nurses in popular culture. Images of...
Swimming Class
...bounds of public decency. This raucous swimming culture was tolerated in natural waters, but city officials wanted none of it in the new artificial waters. They made rules against all...
Improving on Silence
...an option. This is everybody's business. But I'll say some things to the men who are reading. We men benefit, all of us men benefit, from rape culture. We benefit...