culture

To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”

We are courting a phenomenon... See more

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

Luxury surveillance is a phenomenon where "some people pay to subject themselves to surveillance that others are forced to endure and would, if anything, pay to be free of." You might buy a GPS bracelet to track your biometric data (which will be used by other firms), while others might be forced to wear one (and still pay for it) as part of their... See more