http://www.inthesetimes.com/archives/tags/culture/ In These Times features award-winning investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing, insightful analysis of national and international affairs, and sharp cultural criticism about events and ideas that matter. en-us Expression Engine jessica@inthesetimes.com seamus@inthesetimes.com Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4039/why_cynics_are_wrong/ Days before the election, Noam Chomsky told progressives that they should vote for Obama, but without illusions. I fully share Chomsky's doubts about the real consequences of Obama's victory: From a pragmatic-realistic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will just do some minor face-lifting improvements, turning out to be "Bush with a human face." He will pursue the same basic politics in a more attractive mode and thus effectively even strengthen U.S. hegemony, which has been severely damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years. There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction -- a key dimension is missing in it. It is because of this dimension that Obama's victory is not just another shift in the eternal… obama election 2008 cynicism Beau Hodai Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4197/wont_get_fooled_again/ In December, the financial world received its biggest shock yet, when Bernard Madoff, former Nasdaq chair and founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, admitted to employees (and, presumably, to FBI agents who raided his offices the following day) that his hedge fund business was "just one big lie," a "giant Ponzi scheme" that had lost an estimated $50 billion in investments. Among the numerous worthies taken in by Madoff's scam were Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg, Nobel winner Elie Wiesel and publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman. Nonprofit institutions such as the Rockit Foundation and the JEHT Foundation, both large donors to civil rights organizations and other liberal causes, were so heavily invested with Madoff that they were forced to close. It is,… economy financial crisis book review Bernie Madoff culture Beau Hodai Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4216/fake_outrage_junkies/ I'm not sure if it's because we're strung out on "Lost" episodes, or if it's because we're still suffering from a post-9/11 stress disorder that makes us crave "breaking news" alerts, or if it's because the economy has turned us into distraction junkies. But one thing is painfully obvious after Michael Phelps' marijuana "scandal" erupted last week: Our society is addicted to fake outrage -- and to break our dependence, we're going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking. If you haven't heard (and I'm guessing you have), the Olympic gold medalist was recently photographed taking a toke of weed. The moment the picture hit the Internet, the media blew the story up, pumping out… drug policy media culture Beau Hodai Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4176/cross_cultural_in_connecticut/ New Haven, Conn.--in early October, Lorenza Rodriguez Mendoza arrived in New Haven, Conn., to visit her daughter, whom she hadn't seen in 10 years. She and nine other women made the trip from Tlaxcala, Mexico, with a three-month travel visa to visit family members who had come to the United States to work. The women's journey began seven years ago, when they formed a community organization in Tlaxcala, the smallest state in Mexico. Many of New Haven's Mexican immigrants come from this region. Marco Castillo, an anthropologist from Tlaxcala, had passed through New Haven a couple of years earlier and met John Jairo Lugo, an organizer with Unidad Latina en Acci--n, a local grassroots group that supports undocumented immigrants. Lugo… immigration family culture Beau Hodai Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4256/a_real_life_fairytale/ Since the dawn of the movie business, Hollywood's bread-and-butter has revolved around people's idealized notions of love: The nerd can get the princess, and Cinderella can have it all. In other words, nothing else matters when two hearts are meant for each other. Real life is rarely like that, though. In 1950s Hollywood, accepted notions of love and partnership meant being straight. It also meant, as it still does now, that partners often looked and dressed alike, were about the same age and shared class and cultural attributes. But one remarkable couple broke those rules. In fact, they acted as though the rules didn't exist at all. In documenting the more than 30-year relationship between author Christopher Isherwood and artist… movies culture gender Beau Hodai Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:00:29 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4912/mad_men_2.0/ It's difficult to know exactly why AMC's Mad Men has become such a hit, but it is a safe bet that its popularity is not merely a product of the television show's smooth writing, superb acting and retro-cool clothing. What has taken the program from Law & Order-watchable to Sopranos-style phenomenal is its exploration of advertising and public relations--the psychological manipulations that we're immersed in but rarely talk about. In Mad Men's early 1960s, the dark art of selling and spinning were being perfected and modernized. Before television, advertising was largely based on the repetition of anodyne fact--the theory being that if you simply hard-sell a product's virtues, ingredients and effects, that product will eventually fly off the shelves. In… media television culture Beau Hodai Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:00:58 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5243/colbert_conservatism/ Pop quiz--name the political leader who said the following: "We must be willing to pull the plug before sinking more dollars into weapons that do not provide what our warriors need." Now name the leader who said this: "(W)e cannot track $2.3 trillion in (Pentagon spending)... We maintain 20 to 25 percent more base infrastructure than we need to support our forces, at an annual waste to taxpayers of some $3 billion to $4 billion... There are those who will oppose every effort to save taxpayers' money... Well, fine, if there's to be a struggle, so be it." I'm willing to bet many self-described "conservatives" guessed Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich. I would make that wager based on the enraged… culture media Beau Hodai Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:00:39 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5328/the_worst_obsession_in_the_world/ Glenn Beck is the anti-Christ. Sarah Palin is an idiot; yet she is also more dangerous than Hitler, or even George W. Bush. Bill O'Reilly is, day in and day out, the "worst person in the world." Welcome to Countdown with Keith Olbermann, one of the few liberal precincts on television. The show became a refuge for many during the Bush years, especially when Olbermann delivered his passionate on-air editorials about the Bush administration's serial violation of the Constitution and morality on so many fronts. But has the show lost its way? And is Olbermann's obsession with "Bill-O the clown," Beck, Limbaugh and Palin a necessary and important monitoring of what's going on in the right-wing media? Or is it… media culture Beau Hodai Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:00:53 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5348/slaughterhouse-five_at_forty/ Slaughterhouse-Five first appeared in bookstores forty years ago, and it remains the signature achievement of Kurt Vonnegut's long and distinguished writing career. Long in gestation, it oscillates between realism and science fiction, mordant humor and grief, relieved by moments of unexpectedly lyrical imagery to convey the author's experience as a young soldier in the Second World War. He recounts for us his trials after capture by the Germans during their last great counter-offensive, in the chaos of the Battle of the Bulge just before Christmas 1944. Through the tragicomic alter-ego "Billy Pilgrim," we learn about Vonnegut's six months as an object deprived of free will. We are with him standing in boxcars bound, in mysterious stop-and-start fashion, for unknown destinations.… vonnegut culture books Beau Hodai Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:00:23 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5311/our_coffee_ourselves/ When Bryant Simon's book, Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (University of California Press, 2009) arrived in my mail, I thought, great, just what we need: another book by an academic that attempts to understand the world through a simplistic lens, like salt, sushi or coffee. That this genre sells well probably motivated Simon's publisher. But Simon's book is better and more honest than most of the genre in recognizing the limitations of both author and subject. He peeks into the inner life of American culture, but thankfully refrains from offering a unified theory that explains all. Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center… food books culture Beau Hodai Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:00:55 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5444/are_millennials_cursed/ For years critics have feared that while the Internet connected more people in networks, the new social affiliations would be less intimate and more superficial than those garnered in traditional face-to-face social discourse. But contrary to the idea that spending time in cyberspace further isolates individuals in a technologically mediated world, studies show just the opposite to be the case, at least for a majority of people. Katelyn McKenna, a New York University psychology professor, found that "the more people express facets of the self on the Internet that they cannot or do not express in other areas of life, the more likely they are to form strong attachments to those they meet on the Internet." Yet, the same communications… culture media youth Beau Hodai Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:00:35 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5570/inhuman_resources/ Ryan Bingham, the character played with debonair finish by George Clooney in Up in the Air, is a perfect mirror of modern business and social trends: an airport nomad who travels all over the country firing people for a living. Bingham has no desire for a wife, kids, or permanent address. Instead he embraces a devil-may-care ethics of personal freedom. This earns him the disdain of his siblings as well as his newly assigned apprentice, Natalie. Chastising him for his "cocoon of self-banishment" and "ridiculous life choices," she pulls the maturity card with a high-pitched flounce: "I need to grow up? You're a twelve year old!" In Bingham we find a fascination with a cultural role America has tried to… movies culture Beau Hodai Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:59:28 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5573/palestine_revisited/ Joe Sacco has spent his career covering war zones--Palestine, Bosnia, Iraq. But unlike most war correspondents, his dispatches arrive in the form of comics. Sacco uses cartoon renderings of the people he interviews, along with meticulously detailed background scenes, as the vehicle for his striking style of journalism. In his latest book, Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco returns to the Middle East to investigate two incidents that took place decades ago, during the Suez Crisis of 1956. The first incident is a massacre of 275 Palestinian men by Israeli forces at Khan Younis. The story is deceptively straightforward: The soldiers shot the men in their homes or dragged them into the street, lined them up against a wall, and shot them.… books art culture middle east palestine international history Beau Hodai