Eric's Trip
...hot air and opacity, contributing to a general impoverishment of British political culture. His polemic is censorious yet witty, offsetting a surly, jaded disaffection — the man, one feels, has...
Beside the Point: Appearance Anxiety in Eating Disorders
...culture. So about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment, like the pictures we’re shown.... If we magically were able to suddenly change the images we see...
Kippers for Breakfast
...economic globalization, life within America was becoming ever more vertiginous, as American culture was situated at the vanishing point reflected in two mirrors pointed at each other. Growing up as...
How It Feels to Be Free
Raquel Salas Rivera and Carina del Valle Schorske discuss Latinx poetics and what it means to be a Puerto Rican poet and translator after the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
A History of Like
...or "I agree," or "This is awesome"? At first it seems like one of those accidents of popular culture, where an arbitrary boardroom decision eventually dictates our everyday language. In...
Twilight of the Mentors
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my gatekeeper
My Soul to Keep
...show like Shattered was inevitable. Reality television's undying appeal forces producers and show creators to leave no corner of culture unlit. Grungy restaurants, trashy housewives, inbred pageant queens: all is...
Catcalls, Compliments, and Weariness
...bro” culture, a phenomenon taken to ludicrous heights on South Park with the advent of “PC Principal.” (And, more seriously, by James Deen.) PC bros—in South Park and in life—are...
There is no such thing as “The Court of Public Opinion” (but maybe there should be).
...culture is a thing, but wants us to respect the great firewall that protects people accused of crimes from a democratic mass that can’t be trusted; DeBoer, on the other...
The Primitive Accumulation of Cool
...express our uniqueness through the material culture we assembled for ourselves. Without consumer goods, our true self would rest dormant within us, untouched by the desire that could vivify it....
No Accidents, Comrade
...increasingly crowd out the chance new discoveries will be made. Narratives using chance in American culture — the rags-to-riches story, or immigrant emigration story lines — are so prominent, they...
Vol. 22 Editors' Note: Self-Help
...evils of digital culture. Jesse Barron’s “Instructions For Young Manhood” gives some helpful advice to young dudes on how to behave in the gym, tracing the links between the cult...
Speaking in Memes
...culture, a parallel to the biological gene in Richard Dawkins’s original coinage. Many have since adapted the term to describe how cultural products pass virally from person to person by...
Know Your Product
...product can we recognize ourselves as "genuinely" real, given the amount of attention and effort collectively directed at enchanting and foregrounding products within a consumer-capitalist culture. We are ideologically trained,...
Editors' Note, Vol. 34: California
...culture. Holding down the fort are drag culture’s estranged sellout stepchildren: The Real Housewives. The suburban realness of reality television reveals even hetero designs like master-planned subdivisions as forms of...
Sorry Not Sorry
...came to adjudicate his crimes. Who will question Oprah, the billionaire who broadcasts poor people’s slobbering and screaming for her handouts, who christens the literature of our narcissistic culture of...