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It has become an accepted motif of the day, perhaps even a cliché, that data about our lives are captured and harvested in multifarious ways. The rise of powerful new media infrastructures has made this escalation of data harvesting possible. These infrastructures have become the backdrop to everyday life,...

Aphoristic Twitter seems an appropriate medium for what Montaigne called the ‘essai’ - literally, ‘the try-out’ - the ancestor of today’s personal essay. We tweet ideas about philosophy and politics alongside thoughts about what we had for breakfast. Something about Twitter is ‘tentative’ - linking the English sense of...

Not everyone is interested in children, but it is hard to find a person disinterested in their own childhood. Identity is so shaped by those first years of life and the relationships into which people finds themselves happily (or unhappily) born. What it is to be human is a...

Everyone has tried to use Photo Booth on an Apple computer to take a staged photo of themselves looking effortlessly effortless. If you’re reading this and you’re all like, “I’d never do that,” you’re either lying to me, to the NSA, to someone else next to you, or you’re...

The problem with fame, or any unanimous praise, is twofold: 1. You are saying exactly what everyone is ready to hear and you are doing exactly what everyone is ready to see. There is almost no tension between yes-no. Ready not ready.

by Rauan Klassnik (written while watching Nancy Grace and her live coverage on CNN just before and after the Murder One verdict came down). I am not talking here about Jodi Arias’ obvious penchant for blood (or the way blood was splashed all over that bathroom and hallway as...

L-R: Lance Armstrong, David Beckham, Oscar Pistorius by Jenny Diski It hasn’t been a good year for sporting heroes. Lance Armstrong finally admitted what just about everybody already knew, though with barely an apology to the people who devotedly followed him and his organisation, partly because he was such...

From Eurotrip, DreamWorks Pictures, 2004 From The New York Times: When it happens I feel as if I have stepped into a Far Side cartoon. I am a magazine editor, and the galley of an article will come back from a proofreader with a low-frequency word circled and this...

Men can’t just write serious songs anymore or make serious films or write serious books. They also need to date/marry/love serious women who are doing serious things other than dating so-called serious men. Women who actually reflect these so-called serious men’s so-called anti-establishment politics. Hard to take Kanye West’s...