Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • A way to sell selling itself, redux

    With the obligatory cynical caveats*, this two-hander article on online advertising at The Correspondent may be a shoo-in for this year’s Most Buried Lede award: Marketers are often most successful at marketing their own marketing. Ouch. Not exactly news, perhaps… but I guess it’s oddly reassuring to have your assumptions confirmed. (But also suspicious; hence…

  • a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist

    David Graeber at NYRoB, reviewing Skidelsky’s Money and Government. Graeber’s acid prose is almost always a delight to this household, and this piece has plenty of it — though it is the exact opposite of a hatchet-job review. On the tautology of monetarism: The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can…

  • An audience with Saint Donna

    At Logic Magazine, an interview (by, I think, Moira Weigel?) with none other than Donna Haraway. It’s a good long read, so you should go tuck in to the full thing, but I’mma pull some excerpts here for my own purposes. On being accused of encouraging “relativism”, and thereby birthing “post-truth”: Our view was never…

  • the bag contains no heroes

    Siobhan Leddy at The Outline on one of the less-well-known but arguably most important bits of the Le Guinean oeuvre. (Gonna excerpt fairly generously here, because this blog is my online commonplace book, and I learned about link-rot the hard way… but go read the whole thing for yourself, support online writers etc etc.) “The…

  • Temporal delamination

    This piece by Katherine Miller on (a)temporality in the age of the algorithm has been doing the rounds, and with some justification; it’s a strong piece of writing, and it’s grasping toward something important. I’d be lying if I didn’t find its implicit attempt to situate Trump as a sort of synecdoche for the state…