Accounting for Beauty
Erotic capital doesn’t set us free. It yokes women’s careers to the whims of men
Cruise Control
Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.
The Enduring Legacy of Basquiat’s Hair
The painter’s generative conflict (and coif) lives on
Don't Stop Beliebing
If it were opportunistic, it would have a better beat. It’s so earnest and guileless that it’s completely unappealing. It really shows how pointless endorsing Occupy Wall Street is as a gesture. You also can’t dance to it.
The Failure Addict
John Phillips mastered the art of serial disappointment by sharing it compulsively. This makes him a harbinger of the social media age
The Resentment Machine
(Geoff McFetridge, via) The immiseration of the digital creative class The popular adoption of the internet has brought with it great changes. One of the peculiar…
Money, Sex and Tweens
Two YA novelists discuss the gender politics of literature’s biggest growth industry John M. Cusick (JC) is an editor at Armchair/Shotgun and literary agent specializing in YA…
Upping the Antihero
You’re a good cop, but a loose cannon. Give me your badge and gun. Most Americans could write this scene and probably fill in the…
Intimacy as Text; Twitter as Toungue
“Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There’s a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.”
You Know You're the Prettiest Girl
The temptation to dismiss multimedia artist Laurel Nakadate as a wallowing narcissist, a sub-Jackass-level prankster, or an emotional terrorist is strong. She appears as all those things in the retrospective of her work at P.S. 1, inviting the audience’s contempt as well as their lascivious stares.
Comfortably Alone
(via Javier Rodriguez) Social media puts an end to shyness by generalizing its pathology As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that…
Unfree Labor
A review of Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy Taped up in my dorm room there…
Temporary to Permanent
Nothing threatens capitalism’s best excuse for itself — that it is the economic system best suited to individual liberty and human flourishing — more than…
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Internet
The computer is the liar that always tells the truth. If you believe the lie—that what the computer does is beyond human comprehension, that its power exceeds its use value—then you are doomed to be its slave.