Americanism

Risk is expensive, and it does not figure into P&L. When the pressure is to show YoY growth on the quarterly basis, as is the case of the publicly traded companies, or when expectation is to deliver wild returns in case of PE-backed ones, no one wants to make anything remotely surprising or different. Prada is able to put forward fearless... See more

Studies have found that when people spend more time on social-media platforms, they are more likely to buy more things and to do so impulsively—especially when they feel emotionally connected to the content they watch. This is, perhaps, one of the more insidious effects of McVulnerability: It helps encourage a self-perpetuating cycle of materialism... See more

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, later defined its unifying characteristic as ‘the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community’.

“The growing speed of daily life, of news and work and play was a fetish of artists and industrialists alike,” Blom writes. “Never before had so much social change occurred so quickly.” As daily life sped up, people in the west started to break down.

Around the turn of the century, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the U.S. gradually made its... See more