From the category archives:

Linkblog

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

Culture

The College Calculation

The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college.

via The Way

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Culture

Longfellow to Linda Lovelace

Although it has many features of an academic compendium — page numbers that reach into four digits and scores of scholarly contributors — this new

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Culture

James Wood on Richard Powers

The fiction of Richard Powers sometimes resembles a dying satyr—above the waist is a mind full of serious thought, philosophical reflection, deep exploration of music

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Culture

How the Internet has democratized drinking

We are moving from a monologue to a dialogue, and this reflects a fundamental truth about wine: It is a matter of taste, and taste

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Culture

“Buycotting”

It has many names: “buycotting,” ethical consumerism, moral economics, latte activism, critical consumption. Whatever you call it, buying is getting ever more political across the

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Culture

“Authors of our own ambitions”

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success | Video on TED.com.…

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Culture

Choire Sicha on Media Literacy

Stealth marketing, direct advertisement and product placement work only on the clueless, and our immersive, hippo-like wallowing in the marketplace serves only to make us

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Culture

The Mzungu Thing

The safer parts of Africa have become a workshop for high-concept philanthropy, wrapping adventurism in a veneer of charity.

via Alex Halperin, The Mzungu Thing

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