Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel,
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“Game of Thrones was one of the “biggest” TV shows of the 2010s—but only around 5 to 6 percent of Americans ever watched it.”
― Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
― Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

“Yes,” he agreed. “The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.”
― Immortality: A Novel
― Immortality: A Novel

“The cultural industry will always have the means and might to dominate our mind-space, and a major point of “indie snobbery” was to provide counterbalance.”
― Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
― Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

“Ehrenreich wrote evocatively of the strange silence of gyms, a place where people gather together in close quarters but barely speak to one another except to negotiate access to machines. This, she observed, is because the primary relationship at play is not between separate people working out, but between the person working out and themselves as they wish to be, their body double.”
― Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World
― Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“The long tail predicted utopian cohabitation of tiny consumer subcultures but, instead, the professional classes have all coalesced into a world of omnivore taste where nothing is great because everything is good.”
― Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
― Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

A book club for authors, translators, and editors of Global Voices - https://globalvoices.org

A low-stakes quarterly book club for books related to the work of the Hewlett Foundation.
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