One lucky thing to come of this strange year for me has been a seasonal job with CCA & B, the publishing company that has only published two books — but their main one is that little thing called The Elf on the Shelf. Since 2005, it has exploded in popularity, enchanting the imaginations of children in [...]
Another gem from Girls. Hannah has basically been fired from her unpaid internship because the won’t pay her and her parents have stopped supporting her. So she is discussing her situation with some friends. Hannah: So I calculated, and I can last in New York for three and a half more days. Maybe seven if I don’t [...]
I have read two articles in the last week whose arguments have begun with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which argued that as we reached the final demise of the U.S.S.R., “liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over [...]
Bill Saporito’s October 31 Time article said it best: “Consider the cosmic irony: wobbly Western economies are depending on the Chinese Communist Party to save their capitalist bacon. Likewise, the Chinese government’s grand scheme to rebalance its economy hinges on Western-style materialism.” “Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years [...]
My brother and I don’t have cable, but I subscribe to Netflix Instant, and he subscribes to Hulu Plus, so we get access to a truly massive amount of material for less than $20/month between the both of us, via the PS3. So, for the first time in about five years, I’ve been able to [...]
If you ever complain about the price of your jeans, I want you to find a sewing machine and try to hem a pair. Granted, the industrial size and strength of the machines they use to produce them on a large scale is much greater than my personal machine, but I hemmed a pair last night and [...]
For most large retailers, the last thirty years has been about stretching as far across mid-land America as possible, opening stores in malls on the fringes of big cities and in mid-size towns and communities, homogenizing the landscapes and centralizing decisions so that in most of the country, men, women, teenagers, and children could enjoy [...]