The innocently readable novel
...by hand, producing top-quality, artisanal sound systems. Since the boom years in the 1990’s, when (Western) classical music was still revered and a skilled audio technicians were in hot demand,...
Sade Is Punk as Fuck
...sometimes in the guise of an intentionally abrasive avant-gardist innovation. Punk wasn't merely a genre of music; that is, like all genres it aspired to become a totalizing lifestyle, though...
Everybody Have Fun Tonight
...lyrics, performances, and products create a parallel reality. LMFAO describes their music as instructional, a how-to-party-rock guide, and their performances offer no shortage of cues to perform various party actions....
Beauty Blogosphere 2.10.12
...the Lana Del Rey thing, meaning I understand neither the vitriol directed in her direction nor the passionate defenses of her—rather, I don't understand why her music has spurred such...
Hollow Inside
...that eradicates the humanist pleasures of culture — thus seems misplaced. We haven't been "depersonalized" but hyperpersonalized by the ways technology has abetted consumerism. So his concerns about people becoming...
Death and Life in Great American Cities
To bury a loved one from Queens is to confront displacement in the here and beyond
♫ Roxane ♫
...folks. This is not what Gay is about. In an interview with NPR she explains that we “have a really stylized understanding of trauma in popular culture where something bad...
American Saints
...Street Journal would ever locate one source of America’s culture of innovation in the agricultural ingenuity of the Sikh communities of early twentieth-century California. For their success challenges the idea...
Army of Un
...a culture of such outlandish misinformation that the Western media and its audience often respond with laughter. Incredulous, horrified, uncontrollable laughter, more indicative of disturbance and fear than amusement. As...
Naked Criticism
...in an undressed, matter-of-fact way. But in their unfolding they build an account of the culture industry as a kind of dreamscape, one that elaborates all our fears and fantasies...
Let's Tell This Story
...culture. Like many Africans of my generation, Marechera's characters paid homage to African literature by taking it for granted as something that didn't need to be rationalized or justified; more...
Born Under the Tobacco Flower, and Raised Under the Lis
Dreams of a separatist Quebec nation are founded on conservative, racist attachments to bloodline that leftist adherents cannot so quickly disavow
Cruel Pessimism
A new book on debt reminds us that we have not left the time of crisis yet
Community Slander
...York Times. Buffington, who founded Yik Yak with his fraternity brother Tyler Droll, sees their app as a corrective to the (micro)celebrity culture of Twitter. On Yik Yak, they claim,...
The Journalist and the Suicide
...a culture of therapy whose super-coddling, super-encouraging style verges on patronizing. Accounts like Finkel’s convey a general sense of the problem. This many months on the VA waitlist, that much...
The Future Is Femme
...point when the rational neoliberal approach to intelligence collection ousted the honor-bound gentlemanly spy culture of the Second World War. The melancholy of generational irrelevance is present everywhere in Tinker....