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...
Live Through This
...more often than women. But our culture is unable to address rape with the sobriety and clarity the topic deserves because we are still unable to address sex with the...
Weird Corporate Twitter
...American culture on his blog. The voice of Carles's Twitter account was something like that of a perpetually wry and mercurial teenager talking affectionately to his friends. "H8 U" he...
Naming Nameless
...group’s tedious chat logs within a global context of activism and Internet culture. At the same time, Coleman, possibly inadvertently, provides a broader snapshot of a generation’s misbegotten coping mechanisms...
Growing Up TV
...cult of personality in pop culture: We truly have commodified our entertainers’ personal lives. And they’ve largely accepted it, because the privilege of a society’s attention is, I imagine, a...
In His Own Image
...culture of misogyny make it nearly impossible to get an abortion. Sometimes the dissonance between the mainstream gay rights movement and the civil rights of people of color comes in...
Full-Time Daughter
...love white masculinity. There may well be suicidal femmes in non-white culture, but the pop-culture Beautiful Girl Who Longs For Death is paradigmatically white. She could take her pick of...
Book Review: The Beauty Experiment
...could hope for. There’s plenty of reasons to recommend this book: Baker Hyde’s skilled storytelling, the glimpses into her relationship with her husband and the culture surrounding her (she did...
Foodland
...diverse interests in food space, culture, naturally built and virtual landscapes, and environmental issues. Rather than having a website where I write about everything that I find interesting, I force...
Neither Fish Nor Flesh
...The recent ubiquity of mermaids reflects the yearning to celebrate primal female energy in a culture that often denies it There have been a lot of mermaid sightings...
Vapor Eyes
...should really be seen as acts of social reproduction. E-cigs aren’t just a different delivery system for the drug; they represent a reboot of smoking culture. Perhaps more than anything,...
Can’t Take a Joke
An interview with Lauren Berlant
The Tryhards
...culture suffering from its fanatical embrace of a terribly misconceived system of personal advancement and power relations. Meritocracy, a kludgy term for a kludgy purpose — defending aristocratic privilege under...
Emergency Supplies
...galore). And together with Poetry Parnassus itself, it emphasized the idea of poetry, and culture more broadly, as diplomacy, as a kind of annex of international relations (peace on Earth;...
Romancing the Archive
...in Britain’s colonies, composing multi-volume tomes testifying to slave owners’ membership in a political culture based on the timeless rights of Englishmen. Following emancipation in 1838, writers of color would...
The Birth of a Beauty Criticism
...the time, the only ongoing body of beauty criticism I could find. There were individual essays and reported articles critiquing beauty culture and, of course, books on the matter. But...