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.
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.
The peculiar technology of the lo-fi, crappy cassette tape exemplifies the inherent contradictions of popular music better than any other medium.
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.
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.
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.
In Annelise Heinz’s cultural history, ‘Mahjong’, the role of games tells more significant stories than simply recording how we use our leisure time.
Ronald Brownstein’s ode to ’70s Los Angeles is, like so many California stories, less about a sustained moment than a bright and briefly thrilling mirage.
Jonathan M. Berman's Anti-vaxxers, argues that anti-vaccination activism is tied closely to how people see themselves as parents and community members. Effective pro-vaccination efforts should emphasize these cultural aspects.
In The American Robot, Dustin A. Abnet explores how robots have not only conceptually connected but literally embodied some of the most critical questions in modern culture, as seen in this excerpt from chapter 5 "Building the Slaves of Tomorrow", courtesy of University of Chicago Press.
Camille Billops moved beyond predictable and well-tread ground to open up space for new narratives in her films—about Black families, Black women, and Black middle-class life—that pulled on her distinctive and unapologetic worldview.
In Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, historian W. Scott Poole exhumes our obsession with the living dead.