First-Person Deficient
...culture," in this case — which emerges "from the implicit, and even buried dimension of language" to give more a sense of "a 'mentality' made of unconscious grammatical patterns and...
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...
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...
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...
Sunday Reading: August 6, 2023
...of the most talked-about writers in the nation, and in this book, he puts forward a stunning new theory about the culture war that could turn our debates upside down....
Real Inauthentic Like
...on the idea of an “ailing literary culture,” lamenting that each and every novel published now clamors to be heard like church bells rung by wild sugar high children: “All...
Very Serious Populists
...(some of whom are moderators) may not see an article dissecting rape culture as something that “contributes to the conversation” of r/comedy. The voting system is left as the proving...
The Enduring Legacy of Basquiat’s Hair
...grafitti, Basquiat set the culture that the Native Tongues would inherit. He died in 1988, right as the Tongues’ most prominent group, A Tribe Called Quest, debuted. They were the...
Virus in the System
The radical collective Gay Shame keeps the flame of anticapitalist queer politics burning.
Bloodless Coop
...of the erotic, naturalness, stereotypical femininity, and the earth, and also serves, according to the classic structuralist argument, as an oppositional coding that reinforces normative categories of culture, masculinity, and...
Folk Etymologies
If language is the problem, it isn't always the solution.
Faked in China
...where unscrupulous business practices sully the intellectual property of hardworking Euro-American brand owners, or attempt to offer a “cultural” explanation—that is, a racist one, holding Chinese culture as incapable of...
Lessons of Engagement
...of extinction. Schooled in French and its imperial culture, Adnan was drawn at a young age to Lebanon’s local language and poetry, which she was discouraged from learning. (She said...
The New Somali Studies
...arrived in Zeila, his first stop before traveling through the rest of Somaliland and the broader Horn of Africa. He was keenly interested in the culture, beliefs, and practices of...
Games
...reaches an apotheosis in contemporary work culture: Be creative! We’ve got a pool table and a beer fridge and a big open office without cubicles and no benefits and an...
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
...is an art form that tells us as much about Balinese culture as ethnographic chestnuts like kinship structures or gift giving. The cockfight “is, for the Balinese, a kind of...