I’ll be using this in my media course. In the meantime, it’s worth considering whether there’s a twist in the tale that this sort of analysis is missing. Is it possible that the Competent Female Sidekick actually is the hero in many of these stories? The mere fact that she is diegetically subordinated is not dispositive. Felicity […]

As paraphrased by Erik Barker, Dan Ariely’s work suggests that “If you followed every directive from your surroundings these days you’d quickly be broke, obese, and constantly distracted. It’s like we’re surrounded by scheming thieves: thieves of our time, thieves of our attention, thieves of our productivity.” This is obviously true, and it is what lies at the […]

George Monbiot’s recent article in The Guardian  is rhetorically tidy, but substantively distorted in important ways. Most irksome is the depiction of neoliberalism as an idea that was hatched, lay dormant, recovered, imposed, increasingly misapplied, and now failing. The effect is to try and have it both ways: the current situation is a direct effect of a […]

Why do our moral intuitions recoil at the prospect of commercial transactions? One answer: the norm of sincerity governing mundane social interactions (a norm that likely emerged as a paradoxical byproduct of commercial society itself). Take a typical example. Everyone hates shopping for cars. The most obvious reason is the massive information asymmetry characterizing such transactions; the salesperson […]

Can we dispel with the myth that Silicon Valley invented and/or institutionalized “flexible” temporary work? The first contingent workforce agencies came into existence in the late 19th Century. Modern “temp work” was integrated into the economy after WWII with the Kelly Agency. And today’s digital temps owe their existence to desktop publishing agencies (MacTemps, now […]

Been perusing the work of a Well-Regarded Expert in the history of political thought. Said WRE unfailingly follows a strict interpretive procedure that runs as follows. First, examine the work of political thinker to establish whether or not it furnishes any plausible justification for any form of hierarchy. Second, if the work yields any semblance […]