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by Bryant Simon Starbucks invented the four-dollar cup of coffee.  But now it faces challenges on all sides, from McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts on the lower end and eco-friendly and fair trade coffeehouses on the higher end.  While trying to reclaim its seat at the top of the caffeine...

Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway in Mad Men, AMC From The New York Review of Books: Mad Men keeps telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself. As I watched the first season, the characters and their milieu were so unrelentingly repellent that I kept wondering...

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Paramount Pictures, 1986 From The Paris Review: My husband and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) the other night. He’d never seen it before, to the consternation of his Facebook friends, and I last saw it a decade ago, when I remember having been...

School of Athens, Raphael, 1510-1511        Posted by kind permission of James Clifford, this is the text of a talk he delivered at “The University We Are For,” a conference  organized by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown at UC Berkeley (11/5/10). The Berkeley forum is webcast here and...

Brown Skin, Blue Masks | by Nadja Millner-Larsen, Wazhmah Osman, and Danyel Ferrari

Triple Canopy

Perhaps what we have here, in the wake of the failure of the Abu Ghraib images—and countless similar images from Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and so on—is the nightmare...

From The Guardian: When you think of the Beats, you think of free sex and flaming sunsets, of bulbous ’49 Hudsons easing towards the horizon on dusty highways that seem to go on for ever. You don’t think about roundabouts, recycling centres and Rover estates. But that’s what you...

From ResetDOC: In a secular and multi-religious environment, faith is constantly subject to learning and supervision leading to a more rigorous search for piousness and higher awareness of one’s faith. I’ll select three different practices of praying that have provoked a public debate to illustrate the specificity of contesting...

University College London occupation, 2010 by Owen Hatherley Sometimes, the self-referential, apolitical worlds of art and architecture intersect with politics in unexpected ways. One such telling cross-over took place during the winter’s student protests; on the same day as the 30 November demonstration across central London, there was a story in...