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Creative Class

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The Woman in the Room
February 10, 2015
Every woman who’s worked in an office knew that Sony co-chair Amy Pascal was going to lose her job. Though the announcement only came last week, we knew it was coming months ago, when the Sony hacks first hit and an unprecedented wave of stolen emails started flooding ...

The Shrinking Power of Punk
February 02, 2015
Is American indie rock fighting a war it can’t win, or is it just not fighting anymore? It’s too quiet in independent music today, but it wasn’t always so. Greil Marcus introduces his 1989 book Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century by discussing the ...

Notes from the Underdogs
January 05, 2015
It’s not controversial to say that the book publishing world is, and has been for the past several years, a mess. What was once a genteel profession for those with a certain sensibility (and, often, family money) has become a starved and desperate industry. The twilight of the ...

The Smarmies of the Night (Revisited)
December 19, 2014
The Colbert Report, a nine-year running gag in which the former Daily Show correspondent portrayed a louder, meaner, more megalomaniacal Bill O’Reilly, ended last night in a rush of celebrity self-congratulation. The stentorian maximum leader of the Colbert Nation flailed ...

Getting Crumbs in Portland’s Food Revolution
December 11, 2014
In the 1970s, Portland, Maine was a typical New England seaport, with a typical working waterfront slum that that smelled like fish. Trendy tourists weren’t coming ashore from cruise ships, and while there were restaurants—mostly Italian—none were that special. Things ...

The Art of Con
November 17, 2014
Last weekend, heralded all by tourist boards, local TV news reports, and a massive full-color ad campaign throughout the city’s public transportation system, what turned out to be a relatively modest art exhibition opened in downtown Chicago. It shouldn’t have been ...

The Marquis de Sade’s Executive MBA
October 21, 2014
The Deadline: A Novel of Project Management, Tom DeMarco’s 1997 novel, is not a good book. But it is, in its way, a miraculous object: it is, apparently, the first amalgamation of two of our modern world’s most powerful textual forms—the novel and the airport bookstore ...

The Fratty Wolf in Your Leftist Grandmother’s Clothing
October 14, 2014
I want to re-introduce you to someone you probably already know. You might recognize him at a party, or, more likely, at your Marxist reading group, where he’s always expounding on how identity politics detract from the real issues. Some iteration of him appeared in The Awl ...

Exile on H Street
October 08, 2014
I’ll begin by laying my cards on the table. I lived in Washington, D.C. from 2010 to 2013. For almost all that time, my apartment was either in Columbia Heights or Mt. Pleasant—neighborhoods that have recently seen an influx of upwardly mobile young people. Wherever I lived, ...

“Payment on an Unpaid Basis”
October 01, 2014
“Payment is on an unpaid basis,” is a sentence that should not exist. It’s a linguistic offense, but also a legal one: zero dollars an hour is well below the minimum wage in all fifty states. Unless the employee is a child working fourteen hours a day on a farm, an ...

U2, Apple, and the Strip-Mining of Punk Rebellion
September 18, 2014
“Wasn’t that the most incredible single you ever heard?” asked Apple CEO Tim Cook as the last note of The Edge’s guitar died away. He was playing U2’s new single “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” to the audience at the end of a press conference this month for the new ...

The Perpetual Sales Pitch
August 29, 2014
A farmer grows fruit, a carpenter builds a chair. The fruit is fresh or foul, the chair sturdy or flimsy. Either way, the marketplace decides. Relative quality is apparent: the slickest of salesmen will have trouble selling rotten apples if there is decent fruit to be had ...