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With the Revenge of the Head in a long-tail world, cultural literacy for the last few decades requires reading a few serious books every year but also consuming products from the largest conglomerates: Marvel superhero movies (Walt Disney), Beyoncé (Columbia/Sony), Keeping Up with the Kardashians (…

In many ways omnivorism is the only possible taste left. A singular notion of good taste is unjustifiable in a cosmopolitan world. The scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah defines “cosmopolitanism” as “a recognition and celebration of the fact that our fellow world citizens, in their different places, with…

Both poptimism and “let people enjoy things” are part of the meta-sensibility behind postmodern culture: omnivore taste. The virtuous “cultured” individual should consume and like everything—not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and s…

Rank-and-file members of tech companies share similar sensibilities with their billionaire executives: same habitus and black North Face down vest, but very different stock packages. They both prefer functional, authentic goods made with artisanal craftsmanship. There is goodness and beauty in sour…

Before we explore the internet’s impact on culture, we must first heed the sociologist Duncan Watts’s warning: “The Internet isn’t really a thing at all. Rather, it’s shorthand for an entire period of history, and all the interlocking technological, economic, and social changes that happened therei…