Category: Social Theory

  • inside among the outsiders

    Sean Guynes on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: … whereas most utopian novels before Le Guin sent an outsider into the utopian society, tracing their voyage through the social, economic, and political structures of the “better” worlds offered by Gilman’s Herland or Bellamy’s United States, Le Guin cut the narrative in half, shuffled the deck, and…

  • contra Maslow

    I really should have guessed, but I never did know that Ol’ Man Maslow was a management consultant. Sam Haselby at Aeon: Why was corporate America drawn to [Maslow’s] hierarchy of needs? They liked it because it offered both a grand narrative and master explanation for human psychology in a changing society and a practical…

  • the arcade fire

    A long ol’ piece on Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus by Apoorva Tadepalli at Real Life. It’s the sort of epic longread that merits at least a second thorough go-thru (and has as such been stashed away to that end), but this bit leapt out as being Relevant To My Interests, as the old meme used…