Tom Vanderbilt

Reissues However appropriate last summer’s waves of public outrage at HarperCollins’ mass cancellation of some one hundred book contracts, it tended to obscure the far more frequent and much less publicized fact that important books are routinely put out of print by ...

Lessons in Life Last spring, I wandered through “Lessons in Life,” a photography exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. As I gazed at the photographs, an unstated unifying theme of the show began to emerge: each work was either a comment on consumer culture or looked a ...

Just off Highway 126 in Ventura County, California lies the town of Piru. Tucked among the orange groves and foothills of the Santa Clara valley, it is a strikingly well-preserved small town, the kind of place urban theorists dream about and on which towns like Disney’s ...

If every society makes myths to explain the great and unknowable forces of the world, the age of advanced consumer capitalism has wrought its own peculiar mythology: the brand. What originated as a means of selling standardized products across a mass market—essentially ...

Back in the days when I toiled for a media conglomerate, I would find in my mailbox once a month a slim magazine called Vitality. Festooned with time-saving tips and austere food intake regimens, Vitality was a lightning-rod for scorn among the staff. I often wondered what ...

Somehow the pursuit of the American Dream is always most poignant in California. When it crashes here, it seems to do so with epochal fury. “California,” Joan Didion once wrote, “is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; ...

Spiritual enrichment of the non-monastic sort comes in all variety of human packages these days, from the mud-streaked weekend shamans who pass “talking sticks” to the readers who faithfully run up the best-selling statistics for The Celestine Prophecy. I quickly find ...

With its lonely office towers standing sentinel on the side of I-94, Hoffman Estates, Ill., seemed like the last outpost of activity before the billboard-dotted stretch of farmland that eventually becomes Wisconsin. It was a familiar sight for anyone driving north of Chicago. ...