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Category Archives for Media

The Meaning of Sports

This tendency probably occurs more in baseball than in other sports, because baseball supports a stats-obsessed fanbase who participate in levels of erudition and nerdery that only the most astute academics can compete with. This statistical chicanery produces a sporting culture where the highest level of achievement is admission into the sacred “Hall of Fame,” where a player’s whole statistical body of work is canonized and stamped with a mark of superiority.

June 11, 2010
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The Payday Lending Empire

It’s hard to imagine that anyone outside of organized crime or banking would see check cashing as a legitimate business model. Nevertheless, their lobbying efforts have secured them protection from the new bureau designed to save consumers from businesses like theirs.

May 27, 2010
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Reality Television and the Meaning of Things

Last month was the 25th anniversary of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Eight years ago, I was teaching the book in one of my classes and thinking about reality television, still a relatively new field at the time, and I wrote the following essay.

February 25, 2010
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San Diego Legalizes Sleeping on the Sidewalk

Earlier this year I began to notice clumps of adults sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Diego and that’s when I discovered that sleeping on the city’s sidewalks had recently been decriminalized.

July 13, 2009
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The Plastics Industry Fights Back

As for the second idea, that plastics are so valuable that we should recycle them, this connection is truly a difficult stretch of intuition. A valuable thing is meant to be kept around for years and eventually sold on eBay to someone who will pay too much in shipping to receive it.

July 6, 2009
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After the All These Years, Radio Labors to Stay Lame

In short, a small group of radio station owners now controls most of the radio stations in the country, and they use computers to send out the playlist to every station in their group. This results in the peculiar scenario that anyone who’s driven across the country has discovered: each city has all the same radio stations as every other city and their playlists are incredibly predictable.

June 23, 2009
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