Skip to content

Americana

Columns

Sliced, Diced, and Crusading: The State of Indiana
April 27, 2015
Sleight-of-hand revisionism is the favorite trick of pundits. Rarely, however, have we seen it done so well, or in so brazenly ahistorical a fashion, as it was last month in Indiana. As legislators there pursued an evangelical culture crusade against gay marriage, conservative ...

An American Marriage, Revisited
April 24, 2015
Limited Partnership, a new documentary about one of the nation’s first gay couples to be lawfully married, begins with a scene you might find in a legal thriller: an establishing shot of gray-slate courthouse columns gives way to a scrum of reporters positioned nearby. ...

The Mall of American Progress
April 23, 2015
Malls may not be an American monopoly, but America’s not really thinkable without them. They’re where we come together, octogenarian mall walkers and teen Goths alike, as we aim for that perfect, elusive balance between over- and under-stimulation. They’re our own ...

“Some Other Woman” for President 2016
April 21, 2015
When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy, it wasn’t surprising. But I was surprised by my own reaction. For the last week and a half now, I’ve been fighting back an overwhelming sense of dread. It isn’t dread of Hillary. I may have Bernie Sanders politics, ...

The University of Nowhere
April 20, 2015
A cursory look at recent jeremiads on higher education resembles a thesaurus entry for “doom”: Academically Adrift. Education Disrupted. College Unbound. Degrees of Inequality. The Last Professors. It’s no surprise that the latest entry in the field, by Kevin Carey, a ...

The One That Brings You Choices
April 17, 2015
Sizzler has provided white-bread fare above and beyond the cheesy toast you can always find beckoning to you at the self-serve chain’s salad bar. The brand managers at Sizzler HQ also want to remind you that the restaurant is a miniature consumer’s republic in its own ...

The Most Contaminated Place in the World
April 16, 2015
One of the more tragic results of the Information Age’s ballyhooed shrinking (or flattening or scrunching or crumpling) of the world is that we’re better apprised of international tragedies while also feeling less able to do anything about them. There’s an ethereal, ...

BuzzFeed Among the Brands
April 15, 2015
On the social web, all roads lead to brands, so let’s start with a story of a #brand. Five years ago, Domino’s acknowledged what most of us already knew: they made shit pizza. So the company launched an advertising campaign in which it offered a mea culpa and promised better ...

Town Without Purpose
April 10, 2015
Call it The Real World: Whatever. That’s the queasy image conjured by the recently announced partnership between Bud Light and Tinder, to amp up the promotional force of the grog merchant’s pop-up party hub “Whatever, USA”—the kind of promotional stunt that Roland ...

California, by the Nuts
April 06, 2015
In response to the four-year-old California drought, Governor Jerry Brown ordered a 25 percent cut in water use by municipalities across the state last week. The edict has led to a familiar ring of selective fault-finding that displaces a major system failure—such that ...

More Bodies for “Never Forget”
April 01, 2015
Watching the NCAA tournament Friday night at a bar in New York’s West Village, I found myself staring at an American flag pinned to the wall. The World Trade Center, lately rebuilt, loomed about one-and-a-half miles away, its well-lit spire tumescently patriotic at 1,776 feet ...

Freedom Fries: McDonald’s and the Fourteenth Amendment
March 26, 2015
In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser demonstrates the dominance of McDonald’s, not just in the context of the history of the fast food industry, but in the history of all industry. McDonald’s is the largest owner of retail property in the world. The company trains ...