Media & Culture

By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything... See more

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

Inherent in the concept of moral contagion, then, is the idea that moral-emotion expressions are among the most powerful signals to the self and others about one’s identity. As such, they may be among the most functionally relevant forms of expressions in the context of moral and political discourse online, where moral and political identities are... See more

I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.

I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a... See more

What’s more, art is no longer semblance. It fuses with reality.

But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again,... See more

I suspect the rise of inspiration-sharing platforms might be making me, and everyone else on the collaborative internet, more focused on publicising our taste rather than feeding it. It’s easier to go viral on Twitter (err, X) by posting “vintage design inspiration” than it is by posting your own work. New sites like PI.FYI, a social network from... See more