Objectify This

Today’s post is brought to you by the word bricolage, which  Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define as the practice of working with whatever materials are at hand, and making do with what one has. As a cultural practice, bricolage refers to the activity of taking consumer products and commodities and making them one’s own [...]

The new year is here, and with it, new questions.  The New York Times wondered what it would mean if we aren’t calculating horoscopes correctly; Information is Beautiful explored what it would mean if we were; McSweeney’s Internet Tendency asked why comic sans can’t get any respect. I wonder what it would be like to [...]

This Cinco de Mayo, Arizona’s NBA team, the Phoenix Suns, will denounce their state’s immigration policy on their uniforms. NBA.com reports that the Noche Latina tradition includes uniforms displaying the team name “as spoken by the Latino population. . .  The Miami Heat, for example, is called “El Heat”; the San Antonio Spurs are “Los [...]

The following is John Pilger’s acceptance speech for the Sydney Peace Prize. It comes to you courtesy of Zcom, where the verbose, informed radicals hang out. “Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an [...]

If there was a takeaway message from Sarah Palin’s abominable performances on 60 Minutes with Katie Couric, it seems to have been: do not answer her questions. In the clip after the jump, Glenn Beck refuses to explain what he means by ‘white culture,’ if what he’s talking about is spelled that way and not [...]

Images of the “third world” have long been distorted before they are displayed to the American public. Most people don’t even know that “third world” refers to the Cold War and should have died along with “red scare” and those bomb drills where schoolchildren were put under desks. American ignorance abounds when it comes to [...]

Are women’s magazines bad for women? It might seem like a stupid question. But when, as the New York Times reports, a University of Missouri study “found that looking at women’s magazines for 1-3 minutes had a negative impact on women’s self esteem. So imagine what happens if we’re bombarded by these images every day.” [...]