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C Wright Mills commuting to Columbia College, Yaroslava Mills by Dan Hind The inexhaustible novelty of how we feel serves to protect the old order from what we think. C. Wright Mills begins his essay The Sociological Imagination by drawing a contrast between the ‘everyday worlds’ that ordinary people...

MIT in Second Life From The Guardian: Before my tour of MIT ends I am given a taste of what this astonishing abundance of riches means in practice. In the space of half an hour I enjoy the company – in the flesh and spacially – of three of...

Barkley Marathon, 2009, Michael Hodge From The Believer: On the western edge of Frozen Head State Park, just before dawn, a man in a rust brown trench coat blows a giant conch shell. Runners stir in their tents. They fill their water pouches. They tape their blisters. They eat...

by Richard Prouty At one point as I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project I jokingly suggested to my dissertation advisor that I should leave the project unfinished, just like the Arcades Project itself. “Ah, the mimetic fallacy!” he responded. That ended the conversation. His...

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Spyglass Entertainment, 2005 From 3 Quarks Daily: In The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Earth is demolished suddenly and unceremoniously by aliens called Vogons, who are clearing a path for a hyperspace bypass. Our real-life future may not hold a Vogon constructor fleet, but it definitely holds...