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Thought Leaders as Loss Leaders
December 02, 2015
The breathless, investor-beguiling fable that the next iteration of the Web has to be the smart one has been around long enough now to qualify as a touching millenarian faith, like the quadrennial fiction of a “deep” GOP presidential field, or the diehard belief that the ...

For Chyron Out Loud
November 20, 2015
Even amid the fast-multiplying agora of digital platforms, tweets, and instagrams that make up our new millennial mediaverse, one almost-touching platitude continues to transfix the sober lords of the establishment press: the impartial, stern-yet-blasé myth of purely ...

The Biddable Muse
November 12, 2015
If it had been up to me—and it really should have been—Playboy wouldn’t have abandoned its voyeuristic legacy of naked-lady photo spreads and centerfolds. Instead, I would’ve doubled down, expanded the magazine to the epic scale that, say, Vogue attains ...

For Whom the Phone Rings
September 29, 2015
A version of this essay was published at Salon.com in 2014.  It’s genius season again. From NPR to the New York Times, they’re talking about where people were when they found out they had won the MacArthur Fellowship, our society’s most prestigious honor. Twenty-one of ...

Voices of the Village
September 24, 2015
Ronald Blythe is now more than ninety years old, beloved and revered in England as a newspaper columnist, literary critic, and memoirist. But he remains best known for his summer labors of 1967, when he sat down with the residents of a single town in his home county of Suffolk ...

The Novel in Analog: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers
July 22, 2015
Reviewers are having a hard time with Book of Numbers, the latest novel from the incorrigibly ambitious and graphomaniacal Joshua Cohen. Responses have ranged from dismissive to enraptured, with most both at once. The book is “a mess,” writes the New York ...

Metrics All the Way Down
July 08, 2015
According to Spotify, the value of one play of a Willie Nelson song in an Ole Miss dorm room at 4 a.m. is around 0.68 cents, but why stop there? When everything is data and data can be called down through the air, “song” and “book” and “movie” ...

The Joys of Consumption
July 03, 2015
In the 1970s, when the New Deal consensus began to erode, something unexpected started to play a role in popular culture. It was the decade after the industry-approved release of The Pawnbroker (1964), the first Hollywood film to show women’s bare breasts, and all the old ...

Show Those Pearly Whites
June 30, 2015
Officially, things have rebounded since Wall Street collapsed and the world’s wealthiest and most rugged individualists turned to Washington for a bailout. Corporate America is now raking in more money than ever before, and unemployment rates continue to fall, inching back ...

The Branded, the Sponsored, and the Native
June 26, 2015
The name of Samsung’s new advertising campaign for its Galaxy 6 and 6 Edge devices coos with the consumer-soothing cadences of a practiced therapist, or masseuse: “The 30-Minute Recharge: Connectivity Without Concern.” In reality, though, the campaign has all ...

Smile Like You Mean It
June 16, 2015
Such is the exuberant optimism of the staff at Pret A Manger that you’d assume they were treated well. But Pret A Manger’s employees aren’t overjoyed because of good workplace conditions, generous wages, or regular hours; instead it’s because management ...

Spoof Vs. Spy
June 12, 2015
Summer 2015’s first big blockbuster comedy, Spy, may traffic in elaborate onscreen subterfuge, but it’s little more than the latest variation on a baby-simple, well-worn Hollywood formula.The movie’s admittedly energetic and amusing aim is to lampoon and critique the ...