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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Can’t Take a Joke
An interview with Lauren Berlant
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 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;...
Cloudy Logic
...Down to Earth, a short book about the “pseudo-rationality” of mid-20th century American culture drawing on his study of “Astrological Forecasts,” the Los Angeles Times’s astrology column. Adorno uses the...
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...
Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
...exploration? How can parents mediate between the famous Mean Girls sex-ed scene (“You will get chlamydia and die”) and the compulsory sexuality of raunch culture? How do you find a...