I walked down to Occupied Wall Street the other day. Just strolled right on down from Chinatown. I wanted to see it for myself. Not hear about it from my hard left facebook friends, or settle for tepid media coverage. … Continue reading
There is a ping pong table in Tompkins Square Park. It is a strikingly wonderful thing. For it’s made of stone, and quite immovable. Like all hopeful things, it invites play. Like all magical objects, it renders play into something … Continue reading
A huge show of iPhoneography in London will open this weekend. It’s a watershed moment in the history of both photography broadly and iPhoneography in particular. Though hardly the first show to celebrate the aesthetic and cultural implications of a … Continue reading
Wall street, McKenzie Wark recently wrote, is not a place but an abstraction. It’s a host of ideas and projections. It’s what Roland Barthes would have called a mythology, or Foucault may have called an episteme. It is an idea … Continue reading
I’m fascinated by Dutch Manhattan. I like imagining it’s wooden homes and windmills. I am stunned by its perceived closeness with the Lenape tribe, the very people whose primal Manhattan identity has been all but obliterated by the city. I romanticize … Continue reading
It’s time for the tech world to get serious about users. Users, of course, have always been a part of the tech world, and there’s no denying that their tastes, opinions, and preferences have been business and design concerns for … Continue reading
A few months ago, I undertook a study of contemporary social media through a sociological study of the iPhone instagram app. The research project was multidimensional: I used the app for four-weeks, interacting with other users and sharing images I … Continue reading
The destitute Irish are woven as tightly into American history as an Aran sweater. The Potato Famine and its economic outfall (perhaps more deadly than the blight itself) sent the Irish around the world, with a host of them settling … Continue reading
This week the world did not end, but it did change. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkl announced the failure of multiculturalism (“multikulti”) as a social/cultural policy. The implications are that a German language and culturally centered nationalism is essential for … Continue reading
I love the Nike Air Dunk Highs because Nike takes the consistent model and experiments a lot with it. Two years ago, I found an incredible pair with tweed sidewalls and an orange swoosh. I have since worn them into … Continue reading