culture
How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain,... See more
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

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.
Phoebe Tickell • New Deep Narratives: We Need New Stories of What It Means to Be Human
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
Drew Austin • #162: Minimum Viable Self
A 2023 Look-back: the internet dies, etc.
culture.ghost.ioThe 1,000 True Fans Theory works for monetization but not for social impact.
Building at the speed of belonging... surviving the speed of catastrophe
Brian Stoutcitizenstout.substack.com
In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis,... See more
