Gatsby’s Defeat and America’s Status Quo
Gatsby’s fictional legacy is a reflection of America’s all-too-real, relentless ambition, its bottomless hunger for reinvention, and its cruelty toward those who will never reach the upper class.
cultural history
Guns N’ Roses’ Dragged High Art Through Primal Sleaze for ‘Appetite for Destruction’
The coiled intelligence and emotional impact of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction insists that humanity’s ugly reality is better than hypocrisy or quiescence.
The Future Isn’t What It Was
Glenn Adamson’s absorbing survey of futurology, A Century of Tomorrows, reveals that how societies predict the future says more about the era they’re living in.
Take Video Games and Our Perilous Era Seriously
Marijam Dids’ book on video games and culture, Everything to Play For, is a wake-up call for those ignorant of the titanic importance gaming has in the modern world.
Blaxploitation Movies and Music Are the Story of the 1970s
Blaxploitation signaled the moment ghetto culture and the Black vernacular hit the American mainstream, paving the way for rap, hip-hop, disco, and modern sports.
The Fine Art of Bootlegging
Eleanor Patterson’s Bootlegging the Airwaves is a lively study of home-taping in the pre-digital era and the communities this “unpaid labor” created.
For the Love of the Crappy Cassette Tape
The peculiar technology of the lo-fi, crappy cassette tape exemplifies the inherent contradictions of popular music better than any other medium.
The Bunkered Decades: Digging into the Atom Bomb’s Effect on Cold War America
When Americans realized the atom bomb their country created could be turned on them, arts and society alike bunkered down into nightmares of nuclear destruction.
Take a Whiff of ‘Perfume’ and Enter the World of Queer Culture
How did Calvin Klein’s gender-neutral CK One, with its scent like “a vodka tonic with lemon twist”, help inspire gender revolution?Perfume follows the fragrant path into queer culture.
The British ‘Idea of Europe’ Is Still a Mess
Shane Weller’s The Idea of Europe, hampered by an unconscious form of Euroscepticism, suggests that British critics are still not ready to listen to their neighbors.
What Made Mahjong Click with Suburban Americans?
In Annelise Heinz’s cultural history, ‘Mahjong’, the role of games tells more significant stories than simply recording how we use our leisure time.