Full disclosure: I have never read one of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s popular graphic novels about Scott Pilgrim and his epic of epic epicness.  But my students insisted last week that I had to see the film adaptation because it was, well, epic.  And really, you should do something fun after you’ve...

Americans are good at buying stuff. Inseparably, Americans are good at selling stuff. Billboards, flyers, cold calls, even dirigibles and airplanes dragging messages over the coastline: if it persuades a consumer, we’ve got it. Poor, victimized consumers. As a citizen of Los Angeles, I’m accustomed...

Everyone’s talking about the wrong thing.  The Prop 8 trial Perry v. Schwarzenegger recently concluded in a flurry of punditry that had little if anything to do with the case.  While most media personalities spent their time aimlessly speculating or just provoking controversy, anyone who wants to...

Most working adults don’t dream of spending a week of their summer tromping through the mountains with 150 high schoolers and a copy of Plato’s Meno.  But the staff of Wheatstone Academy are an odd bunch. Wheatstone Academy is the brainchild of Dr. John Mark Reynolds, founder and director of the...

Self-reflection is a tricky thing.  When we feel we’ve moved on from some idea, passion, or stage of our life, we tend to distance ourselves from it, like the college student who denies he was ever a Trekkie once he realizes Star Wars is truly superior.  We harbor contempt (or at least embarrassment)...

Unless you’re a devoted fan of NPR or The New Yorker, it’s unlikely that you’ve heard of the late David Foster Wallace. Unbeknownst to many, David Foster Wallace, or “DFW,” as he is sometimes called, was one of the most influential and insightful writers of our age. Deeply aware of the social...

What can be said about a painting of a girl washing dishes? We barely think about the act of dish washing. We barely contemplate this familiar experience at all. Standing in a room called a kitchen; the dirty sink, the brightly lit lamp. This is the space we inhabit as we eat, drink and wash. This is...

Empathy is one of humanity’s best qualities. And it can also be the most neglected. When insurmountable obstacles confront a community, understanding and compassion from neighbors is often just enough to pull them through. But what if the obstacle is something few can understand? What if it’s trauma...

There are two great lies that I have heard: “The day you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will not surely die” and that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican and if you wanna be saved, you have to learn to be like Him… It would be easy to dismiss these lines from Derek Webb’s A...

While some economic theorists take notice of class distinctions and their impact on quality of life, few choose to go deeper by asking such questions as “how does capitalism shape our feelings?” Eva Illouz does just this by bringing abstract economic theory to the realm of the personal. Illouz acknowledges...