February 2012
1 post
3 tags
Plus Ca Fucking Change
So three years ago, I inadvertently launched my online column with a look at how New York magazine sucks up to the vanity of Wall Street oligarchs and pretends to call it journalism. And now just look how far we’ve come!
Meanwhile, for a glimpse at the disheveled thinking behind All Things Rich People Things, the good people at Full Stop have published an interview with your humble...
January 2012
3 posts
7 tags
2011: The Forrest Gump Year in Books
Is it really possible to turn a year-end literary review piece into yet another occasion to revisit the occluded state of social thinking in these United States? Judge for yourself!
4 tags
Ransacking leftover Lehman* dosh (*no relation)
In which your self-punishing correspondent attends a sell-off of random swag from the failed investment bank, and reports back to the Washington City Paper.
Rich People Things Gets Results!
So, two pieces of news: Rich People Things (the book) appears to be headed for a second printing, thanks to the marketing prowess of the good people at Haymarket Books. (Also, a hat tip here to the equally good people at independent bookstores such as McNally-Jackson in NYC, which has grouped my plutocracy-baiting screed among the bestsellers of 2011.)
Meanwhile, a recently released Pew study...
December 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Gathering of Narcissists Turns to Tragedy
To get rich is to magnify the marginal utility of your consumer preferences, if we might be permitted a clinical paraphrase of Deng Xiao Peng (or some nameless Deng functionary). So if you’re going to commute to Wall Street from this or that tastefully cloistered suburb, you should forgo the seedy bus-ferry-subway nexus in favor of a helicopter. And if you’re trying to kick an...
5 tags
The Chavs and Have-Nots
In which I review Owen Johnson’s Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.
4 tags
Cargo Van Cult Haunts Gotham Streets
In my unmourned midwestern youth, vans were a status symbol for a certain drugged-out kind of dude-on-the-make. If the vehicles in question were airbrushed with the countenances of R Crumb characters or pastel-drenched beachscapes, the owners were singled out on the roads of Davenport—and so they fondly hoped, in the hearts of eager young lasses—as true masters of countercultural...
November 2011
1 post
In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It’s a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation’s financial elite. As the author explains, “American class privilege is very much like the idea of sex in a Catholic school—it’s not...