Activity

Again and again, Pixar indulges the tropes of flip-flop-wearing Northern California but ends up with something that sounds a lot like Ayn Rand. For a big-budget Disney production, Wall-E gets pretty brutal in its takedown of consumer capitalism. Thanks to the efforts of a giant corporation, Buy n L…

Rand presents a world in which self-reliance is easy and pure. And her work depends on an understanding of self-reliance that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny once you’ve had to, you know, actually self-rely. She is an absolutist about things that are clearly socially conditioned, which can give…

Cartoonists, sex workers, mommy bloggers, book reviewers: there’s a pretty clear gender dimension to this division of labor. The programmers at Yelp are predominantly men. Its reviewers are mostly female—and, at least in the initial years of the company, this was even more true as you got to the mo…

McLuhan’s books are painful, not because his jokes are overly recondite, but because they mistake chumminess and condescension for making common cause with their audience