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Culture Trust

Columns

The Assassin’s Fate: Paul Berman Shoots and Misses (Again)
August 08, 2014
  We Sicilians are connoisseurs of malevolence. So I approached Paul Berman’s hatchet job on Alexander Cockburn (The New Republic, August 1) with an alacrity tempered only by my apprehension that Berman wasn’t quite up to the job. His previous attempts at character ...

Bulldozing the Humanities
August 01, 2014
By now, denizens of Facebookistan are familiar with its ever-proliferating “You know you’re from…” groups. Reuniting people dispersed by the winds of commerce and time, these hometown pages are drenched in shared nostalgia for local businesses, buildings, ...

Amway Journalism
July 28, 2014
Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. The new media charlatans’ latest cure-all is a toxic concoction of marketing-seminar bluff ...

The Partial Promise of Feminine Hygiene Patenting
June 03, 2014
In 1926, the nascent sanitary napkin industry was in peril. Women, all a-flutter about their rights and whatnot, were proving resistant to giving up their maternally derived tendencies to make their own sanitary products. Traditionally, women sewed pads from castaway fabrics, ...

TV Noir: The Saddest Cliche in the World
September 20, 2013
Are we witnessing the crystallization of the saddest cliché in the world? With one episode left in the first season of the addictive British series Broadchurch, the audience still doesn’t know who killed young Danny Latimer and time is running out for both the detectives and, ...

A Pax On All Your Houses
September 11, 2013
The Internet got off to a great start this week! It killed a man. Saw, acknowledged, then scalped him. He is dead, for now. We can all rest. The era of Pax Dickinson being-employed-while-having-an-offensive-Twitter is over. Pax Dickinson, the erstwhile chief technology officer ...