Thomas Frank

It’s not difficult to understand the sense of historical frustration that informs so much of the bitter populism of recent decades. We, too, regret many of the ways the world has changed over the last thirty years; we, too, believe that the vast majority of Americans have ...

The prominent sociologist Herbert Gans had been writing about popular culture and its audiences for some twenty years when he published his 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture, a 159-page summary of his thinking on the subject. The volume is now twenty-five years old, ...

Back to Normalcy II: The Theory Upper-middle-class life still has its comforts, to be sure. If anything, the suburban piles are getting bigger, the SUVs more imperious, the hotel employees more servile, and the frequent-flier perks more lavish. But turn on the TV and revolution ...

The Cartesians of this world must find it difficult to listen to WYPA, the Chicago AM radio station that fills its broadcast schedule with a torrent of three- and four-minute talks on aspects of success, leadership, and entrepreneurial virtue. Not only does the object of desire ...

Have you heard? The “affluent society” is over! Virtually every respectable organ of public opinion has now officially acknowledged its demise: the warm old world of general prosperity is gone forever; poverty and economic insecurity have made a triumphant comeback; the ...

One wall of the office lobby of the J. C. Nichols Company, the Kansas City real estate firm, is decorated with an enormous cartoon map of the famous Country Club District, the company’s greatest accomplishment and the nation’s first fully restricted, fully-planned ...

I. Wealth Against Commonwealth Revisited In the United States, where political “change” means further enriching the already wealthy, and where political “dialogue” is an elaborate charade that excludes dangerous and difficult topics from public consideration, one must ...

OPINION Consolidated Deviance, Inc. (“ConDev”) is unarguably the nation’s leader, if not its sole force, in the fabrication, consultancy, licensing, and merchandising of deviant subcultural practice. With its string of highly successful “SubCults™”, mass-marketed ...