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Culture Trust

Columns

Game of Thrones, Meet Tony Robbins
April 14, 2015
I admit it: Game of Thrones’ massive popularity took me by surprise. When I first read George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, I frankly could not understand how it managed to capture its legions of fans. Like many “dark fantasy” writers of the 1980s and ...

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 ...

He’s the King of Saving the World
April 07, 2015
Let us pause for a moment to recognize how much we as a society owe to Leonardo DiCaprio. I myself became aware of DiCaprio in the glory days of the 1990s, when he ushered “I’m the king of the world!” into our shared vocabulary—his earliest, and perhaps greatest, social ...

Viva El Jay
April 03, 2015
In his 2003 song “Public Service Announcement,” Jay Z claimed he was “Che Guevara with bling on”—a reference to a Che T-shirt he’d worn on an episode of MTV’s Unplugged. In both the MTV stunt and the song lyric, the rapper-cum-entertainment mogul ...

Starbucks’s Race to the Center of Civic Life
March 18, 2015
The next time you order one of those faux-Italian-named sweetened coffee drinks at a Starbucks store, you are likely to receive a cup with the hash-tagged words “Race Together” written on it, just above your misspelled name. If you ask the Starbucks employee what it’s ...

Dangerous Designs on (AP) American History
February 26, 2015
Any city upon a hill invariably rests on a mound of bullshit, and the extent to which one knows it depends largely on one’s willingness to inhale through his or her nose. In this sense, we might simplify the ongoing debate over the College Board’s updated AP U.S. History ...

The Nuances of Nonbelief
February 13, 2015
The fact that alleged Chapel Hill shooter Craig Hicks is a professed atheist, according to mostly unrequited and pathetic overtures on his Facebook page, has overwhelmed media outlets with giddy fascination. It has also exposed troubling contradictions in how the media often ...

The Well-Trod Path: Nick Kristof at Home
February 12, 2015
Having liberated the “better half” of the developing world from gender-based oppression and poverty, the New York Times’s fave do-gooder Nicholas Kristof and his trusty investment-banker sidekick Sheryl WuDunn have set their sights closer to home. Folks on the war-torn ...

London’s Poor Fetish
January 13, 2015
Visit any bar in the hip London districts of Brixton, Dalston or Peckham and you will invariably end up in a warehouse, on the top floor of a car park, or under a railway arch. Signage will be minimal and white bobbing faces will be crammed close, joined together in a Stockholm ...

On Wealth and Women on TV
January 12, 2015
The conflict that kicks off the plot of Gilmore Girls—the early ‘00s teen drama that has had, over the course of the last year, a full-blown, Netflix-driven renaissance—centers around money. Rory Gilmore, the gifted and angelically beautiful teen who comprises one half of ...

Get Up, Light Up (Get Rich)
December 09, 2014
There are celebrity sell-outs in every business—even the drug business. Fans of the world’s most famous reggae icon—once thought to be the herald of a spiritual revolution—might be taken aback to soon find his face smiling up from the packaging of the new “Marley ...

The Glossy Magazines of the Islamic State
December 01, 2014
Every organization now peddles its ideology the same way that Nike and MTV do–mass media. Stormfront is a notorious website for (mostly) American neofascists. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) has a website. The American Socialist Party is on Twitter. And ...