From the category archives:

Culture

A selection of my published work since 2001 is available here. Contact me with any specific requests.

Culture

Too smart for our own good

The premise behind any worry that kids are getting dumber is that this is a bad thing, a development to deprecate. If Johnny can’t write …

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Culture

Attribution Lacking

Revising the details, checking the facts, finding new archives: Those are what is most exciting for historians. Failing to give credit deliberately destroys the traces,

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Culture

The Evolution of Jewish Humor

A well-curated lightning tour by Chris Bonanos. The Evolution of Jewish Humor — New York Magazine.


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Culture

Videogames and Nostalgia

Video games may have been an escape, or a respite, or a memory of fun and intense competition, but whatever they are to the people

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Culture

Stephen Metcalf, Explaning the Rise of the Parenting Genre

The more fragmented, individualistic and competitive a society, the more the common institutions with at least some child-rearing function—the church, the public school, the actual

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Culture

Love’s Labors and Costs

But even if Miller, like many a marketer who came before him, flogs his product too hard, his broadest point is well taken: We are

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Culture

Shop Class as Soul Craft

As Michael Agger writes:

We all can’t become motorcycle mechanics. And while Crawford would not be so unsubtle as to suggest direct prescriptions for happiness,

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Culture

Gerald Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

Parody and then some:

Many years later, and many times over, the famous writer was to remember the day he discovered how to set about

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