Ramadan Diaries, Day Four
...of the Old Wild West," and the erasure of Black outlawry from popular culture and American mythology. I don't believe in coincidence, and my mind ponders how many more cowboy...
Value-seeking surveillance and The Hunger Games
...state makes that entertainment. In our world, the culture industry alone used to turn that stuff out -- ironically enough, The Hunger Games phenomenon is exactly this sort of entertainment...
Digressions of an Opium-Eater
...new fluidity of culture and experience for the street’s denizens. That Dimple finds her encounter with the artist as confusing and traumatic as eye-opening and exciting hints at the coming...
Presumed conspicuous
...culture (necessitated by grow-at-all-costs capitalism) and its promises of social fluidity, the boundaries of social caste are maintained less through tradition and bloodlines and such but through appropriately staged taste...
The Potato System
...potato monoculture. Toil would ease, and with it discipline, breeding serious moral and social ills. The “effect of depending too exclusively on the culture of the Potato is fearfully exhibited...
The Revolution Goes Kablooie
...culture. You might as well call it anti-Friedmanism or anti-Gladwellism, because at its best, critical theory opposes reduction and teaches us that sexual preference isn’t an either-or toggle between straight...
Pryor Restraint
...had become too entrenched in our culture to make out. Black American movie stardom existed before Richard Pryor, flourished even, but through the lens of his arc from ace comic...
Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs
...indeed, meme culture (including but not limited to YouTube parody, stock photo art, cut-ups and image macros) can be seen as the user asserting a subjectivity that exists and thrives...
Sunday Reading
...Syrian Dialect for the Use of Visitors to Syria and Palestine (1901) Vintage Arab Maths Questions Kerim Friedman: Language is a complex tapestry of trade, conquest and culture Can ‘They’...
Dead and Going to Die
...Powell was to kill the secretary of state, and their co-conspirator, George Atzerodt, was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. Atzerodt failed to attempt the assassination altogether. Powell followed through...
Gotta Have a Code
...Moreland: So, you're my eyeball witness, huh? [Omar nods] So, why'd you step up on this? Omar: Bird triflin', basically. Kill an everyday workin' man and all. I mean, I...
Blue Life
A movement that conjures the specter of an enemy that it seeks to annihilate
Found Poetry
...to take over Gaza temporarily, forever Israel, unlike Hamas, will be hard Israel, unlike Hamas, isn’t trying to kill civilians. Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised It’s taking...
Paradoxes: On Suicide and Literature
...kill themselves more often than other professionals. Statistically speaking, doctors have the highest suicide rates. Nonetheless, because of their special relationship with language, writers have a special relationship to death...
Fuck Forever and Never Die
...secret counsel through some pivotal expository missions, the story offers an affecting dilemma when another faction asks you to kill him. The featherless old bird, it turns out, had been...
Daughters Have Their Own Agenda
...by her waiting and especially by her waiting for a cheater, a no-good, and also some light vision of universal progress, both the degrader and carrier of culture. In an...