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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Cooking Class
...years of writing The Austerity Kitchen, my blog about alimentary culture and history, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that some of the best food writing (in the United States,...
Ambiguity City
The Neighborhood Politics of Big Tech in Berlin
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 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...
Weight Gains
...culture of laziness and excess à la Wall-E’s floating invalids: claims centered on specifically U.S.-American attitudes to work or disposable income level must be chucked. So what has caused this...
Virus in the System
The radical collective Gay Shame keeps the flame of anticapitalist queer politics burning.
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...
It has always been profound to me that the brass ring is a brass ring.
...come to be seen as both the precursor and hallmark of success. And so also the object of imitation. Hence our present culture of imitation. In this culture a successful...
Life on Autopilot
An interview with Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley, a memoir about the tech-bro universe’s notions of progress