Bryant Simon is the director of American Studies at Temple University and the author most recently of Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks.
Features
Monday, January 11 2010
Starbucks and the New Age of Censorship
Like Kremlin censors, Starbucks regulates choice -- not to retain state power, but to bolster corporate profits -- and the distinction between the role of government and brands gets fuzzier all the time.
Reviews
Tuesday, January 11 2011
The Man Whom Elvis Learned From: Louis Prima and 'That Old Black Magic'
Like Elvis, Louis Prima was not just a popular, even wildly popular, hip-thrusting entertainer. He was an incendiary figure, shoving conventions out of the way and blowing up rigid identity-making categories.
Monday, June 28 2010
'Elsewhere U.S.A.' Prods Us to Look Up From Our BlackBerrys and Ask, 'Where Are We?'
This reads more like the smart, well-informed, scatter-shot elsewhere-ish impressionism of Malcolm Gladwell than the sharply focused, outraged empiricism of Robert Putnam or the politically fueled reporting of Naomi Klein.
