Life Inc.

Congressional Research Service report found that for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the local community ended up losing three. Furthermore, the jobs created were at lower wages (an average of under $250 a week), fewer hours, and reduced benefits. A majority of Wal-Mart employees with children live below the poverty line, qualifying for

Industrialization meant that labor could now be exploited indirectly, through technology, and from a great distance away. Free-market capitalism meant that class divisions could be enforced through the impersonal movement of the markets instead of by direct repression.

Although it launched an era of home ownership as private enterprise, Levittown was itself made possible by a massive government subsidy. Even though a lion’s share of the money ultimately ended up going to the Levitt brothers, without those subsidies the vast majority of residents never would have become home owners on their own. Not that its curre

Going into debt, distancing ourselves from our neighbors, and striving for conformity became equated with freedom.

An ad ridicules a grandmother for daring to knit Christmas presents for her family and shows just how disappointed they will be by her pathetically homemade gifts. Is she that stupid—or just that cheap? Doesn’t she know there’s a dotcom merchant who lists the presents they already want? Ones labeled with real brand names that people know? Cagier ma

While legends of violent meat-eating Homo sapiens vanquishing tribes of Neanderthals still garner rapt attention at dinner parties, there is little evidence that such events ever took place. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence for the less dramatic assertion that a combination of tools, hunting, gathering, and food-sharing permitted what

The brilliance of Reaganomics was to marry the antiauthoritarian urge of what had once been the counterculture with the antigovernment bias of free-market conservatives. In Reagan’s persona as well as his politics, the independent, shoot-from-the-hip individualism of the Marlboro Man became compatible—even synergistic—with the economics and culture

Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are finding ourselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best p

Advertising doesn’t merely mean to suffuse the atmosphere; it means to become the atmosphere.