culture
The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because... See more
How 4chan became the home of the elite reader
Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. While previous... See more
Eric Drott • Music as a Technology of Surveillance
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
Henrik Karlsson • First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us

What’s the definition of culture? Culture is what we do to make our survival normal.
By mistaking language as merely a tool that’s a means to an end—little different from a spatula—too many people have lost sight of the fact that understanding language provides the basis of smart thinking.
The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
Salmon don’t have a cosmic story that they talk about. They are born into the world and they instinctively know the direction in which they need to swim. It’s built into their DNA, inherent in their being. People, on the other hand, need stories that are created and expressed through culture in order for us to find our way forward.