It’s curious how this parallels what goes on in academia. In academic fields like cultural studies, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on finding and celebrating instances of audience “counter-hegemony” or audience “agency” instances of...

People are born in a certain place, and in a certain society. I don’t mean to sound like a determinist, but to think we’re entirely free to do whatever we want betrays a certain class...

People understand how, with the concentration of ownership, the things that make up their lives are increasingly under the control of fewer and fewer hands. We see a great, popular demonology of corporate villains that...

In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It’s not as if people don’t know what is going on.

These sensibilities are old, 19th century, republican ideals. That attitude has pretty much gone away. I’ve been reading muckraking books from the 1930s, when there was still this intense hatred and fear of monopolies –...

I always want to keep returning, in my writing and in my thinking, to the fundamental core fact of our society’s exploitative structure. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the stock market is doing, or whether...

As we all know, Nike is a terrible exploiter of labor in other countries while advertising themselves here as being the bearer of “authenticity,” with products that will put you back in touch with “real...

What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn’t deny it and doesn’t try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not...

In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task – of taking them to account for what they’ve done – and this is especially true in the cultural realm.

I was in a bad mood when I wrote that.

There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The...

An appeal to reason in a dark time.

In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state’s dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck...

We’re trying to put all the pieces together.

he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a...

The public is becoming more engaged with this project as each new phase starts. We hope to address the very real concerns people have.

We’re all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.

Some meetings’ minutes are missing. There are a number of gaps.

I think there’s great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.

I actually don’t express contempt for the rank-and-file conservative voters in Kansas. The conservative reviews of the book claim that I do, but by and large I am very respectful of these people. I certainly...

These days, of course, the focus of talk about popular liberation through products is mostly associated with the Internet. I’ve been collecting computer ads and ads dealing with Internet industries.

We favored and supported that move.