Facial hair, body hair, long hair, wigs, makeup, dresses, heels, nails and lingerie are all fair game for mixing and matching.

Vemanei — whose remarks were met by snaps and murmurs of approval — said that ballroom exists specifically for dark-skinned trans people to be valued and celebrated

Two hundred and fifty-six of these tapes have been reissued posthumously as double CDs in the officially sanctioned (though often shoddily produced and mastered) Diary of the Originator reissue series. Past that there are a few dozen piecemeal retail collections of varying degrees of legitimacy along with a countless number of tapes that have yet to be anthologized but are likely still floating around in shoeboxes and glove compartments or as ghosts in the Megaupload machine.

Michael Watts and Beltway 8

Even when the savior fails, destroys everything, and becomes a monster, his agency overrides that of everyone else and reduces them to side stories who are swept away in the terrific power of his myth. Everyone else who could have spoken but wasn’t allowed to becomes a mere accessory to a tragic coming-of-age story.

And he further complicates his usage by not confining this “Muslim flavor” to the Fremen, the Native people of Arrakis. Rather, he extends it throughout the story’s universe—its peoples, religions, proverbs, and books. Advertisement

neo-minstrel

Nas wasn't the first artist to earn this score

Nas was a highly-buzzed-about serious young rapper making a very serious rap album about his very serious world. Along with a who's who of star producers, Nas was making a classic in the hope that it would be digested as a classic.

one of the earliest rap LPs that could be defined as album-oriented

For the majority of its 35-year existence, hip-hop has been consumed as a singles-oriented genre

I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

one of our distinguished jurists

the stores’ humiliating racial signs

Once boasting about making “50k for a verse, no album out” on Kanye West’s “Monster,”

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the last remnants of the golden era of female rappers petered out. Only a handful remained on major labels, down from more than forty in the ’90s.

“Boom Skit,”

first single

he offered her a pair of Sergio Valente dungarees in exchange for her help

The chill playlists presuppose that listening to music is a passive experience, but one that can facilitate productivity, much in the way that setting the office thermostat to a particular temperature might make people work longer or more attentively.

It made me feel more agitated than relaxed, as if I were being placed on hold for an indefinite period of time—possibly the rest of my life.

I am grateful for the beauty of ambient music, which intentionally prioritizes mood and feeling over melody and rhythm

on-record shout outs

his underground classic "Top Notch Hoes"

arguably the most influential hip-hop DJ of this century

and

the question becomes what is it for, what will it make possible. Not necessarily for good or ill, but in the sense of illumination: What does it allow us to see, or to describe, that we haven’t yet made transparent to our own sense of the coming world?

is quite emphatically (pace J. Cole) the final nail in the coffin of the whole project of “conscious” rap

Could black intellectuals abandon wholesale our favored set of metaphors, drop our reflexive turns to improvisation, to discursive riffs meant to signify a kind of mimetic relationship to the sound?

Dear Angel of Death, by the poet Simone White

Everyone has the wants that they want, and so everyone universally has opposition

Girard’s triangle of mimetic desire

But the music really does, somehow, sound like the future, like something that’s never been tried before, a radical experiment.

The rise of the female trap star is no longer in question; an entire wave of talent is coming up fast and the skew that they will bring to the sexual and gender politics of popular culture will scramble and recode the norms of an earlier era in ways that could prove explosive in the context of increasingly desperate reactionary and progressive battles for hearts and minds

Now crews from every high school across the country compete to make viral videos of gorgeous dance routines to accompany the release of a new single.

People sometimes forget that for the latter half of the Nineties and the early Aughts, dancing for a “real one” was a nonstarter.

to say that they are just occupying the space formerly dominated by the boys doesn’t quite cut it

the celebratory alt-feminist crunk of Princess Nokia

Young M.A

Make in a night what you make in a month (“Erase Your Social”)  — the percussion lands on a cymbal crash aimed at a “you” that is really “us,” the audience, who are invited to voyeuristically watch his performance (wordplay as foreplay), of which the unnamed woman is the desensitized object, but “we” are ultimately the target, the losers in the winner-take-all game of life, the suckers who work for a monthly paycheck who can’t possibly compete with the value the market has bestowed on the speaker.

Jesse McCarthy

“I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again,” and that he found the Windy City’s inhabitants “proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”

ludic play

Donald Glover’s role in assisting the song to the top of the charts.

William H. Gass

“Mask Off”

beauty

a necessary raw fuel, a lubricant for soothing

narcocarceral

A social life strictly organized around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy

Hence the outsize importance of the latest black music (trap) in selling everything: Sweetgreen salads prepped and chopp’d by the majority minority for minimum wage, real estate roll-outs, various leisure objects with energetic connotations, the tastefulness of certain social gatherings.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that insofar as you’re interested in having a good time, there’s probably never been a sound so perfectly suited to having every kind of fun disallowed in conservative America

brutal

showering from below

cultural capital

soft power

the colonization of space, time, and most importantly cultural capital by the socially mediated system of images called the internet

the abyss of the prison archipelago where the majority poor remained

the possibilities (in fact necessity) of self-commodification

negative freedom

Floydian vamp on the trap sound

Rae Sremmurd’s “No Type”

A preoccupation with depression, mental health, a confused and terrible desire for dissociation: this is a fundamental sensibility shared by a generation.

“Percocet keep ’em motivated / Good drank keep a nigga motivated / Lortabs on my conversation / Talk a lot of bands then we conversatin’ / I was on my way to Rice Street in the paddy wagon and it had me numb / The pain from the slum had me numb” (“56 Nights”)

The music records all this. It sounds like this

For the ambitious children of the bourgeoisie, high achievers raised on Adderall, Xanax, and a raft of discreet legal narcotics, drugs are the norm just to get to sleep, to deal with anxiety, to avoid crushing bouts of abjection and the relentless pressures to exceed and excel.

In the hood, promethazine, the syrup of Houston, became the fashionable coping agent for those living in the free-fire zones of America, where turf wars regulated with cheap handguns cut down lives in a vicious spiral.

From so many points of view, then, one looks out into the Trump era with a prevailing numbness, nihilism, cruelty, ambient anxiety, disarticulation seeping in from all sides.

warehouses not yet colonized for gentrification at the edge of town

Molly became a favorite

The drug crisis initially thought to be merely a breach in the hull of the underclass confined to the black ghetto spilled out into white rural America with meth and prescription painkillers,

video for L’A Capone’s track “Round Here,”

David Walker’s graphic pointers in his Appeal

In the harder, street-oriented version, luxuries are replaced by what one has, which is only one another: gang signs interlock, boys on the verge of manhood huddle and show they have one another’s back.

Trap videos for obvious reasons continue an extended vamp on the visual grammar developed in the rap videos of the Nineties, a grammar that the whole world has learned to read, or misread, producing a strange Esperanto of gesture and cadence intended to signify the position of blackness. In the “lifestyle” videos, the tropes are familiar, establishing shots captured in drone POV: the pool party, the hotel suite, the club, the glistening surfaces of dream cars, the harem women blazoned, jump cuts set to tight-focus Steadicam, the ubiquitous use of slow motion to render banal actions (pouring a drink, entering a room) allegorical, talismanic, the gothic surrealism of instant gratification. In the harder, street-oriented version, luxuries are replaced by what one has, which is only one another: gang signs interlock, boys on the verge of manhood huddle and show they have one another’s back. Women occasionally appear in an accessorizing role, but more often are simply absent. In the video for L’A Capone’s track “Round Here,” the indication is blunt: “Whole block got cane / But stay in your lane / Cause niggas getting changed.” Like David Walker’s graphic pointers in his Appeal, one of the key punctuation marks of this gestural grammar is the trigger finger, pointing into the camera — through the fourth wall — into the consuming eye. The very motion of the arm and finger are perversely inviting and ejecting. You are put on notice, they say. You can get touched.

In the “lifestyle” videos, the tropes are familiar, establishing shots captured in drone POV: the pool party, the hotel suite, the club, the glistening surfaces of dream cars, the harem women blazoned, jump cuts set to tight-focus Steadicam, the ubiquitous use of slow motion to render banal actions (pouring a drink, entering a room) allegorical, talismanic, the gothic surrealism of instant gratification.

a grammar that the whole world has learned to read, or misread, producing a strange Esperanto of gesture and cadence intended to signify the position of blackness

the visual grammar developed in the rap videos of the Nineties

The drum machine popularized by the (black and gay) “jacking” sound of Eighties Chicago and Detroit is put to use in a way that is less mechanical than its forebear, more syncopated, wavy, elastic.

The drum machine popularized by the (black and gay) “jacking” sound of Eighties Chicago and Detroit

Rodney Carmichael, “Culture Wa

It’s enough to make you wonder who the real trappers are in this town.

disgrace their districts by failing to advocate for economic equity

sub rosa

 getting in formation

a tone parallel that floats over the field

the ideal of a supremely luxurious attitude toward luxury

VVS diamonds

But hey, who asked them?

Indeed, the trend in pronouns at that time was toward a leveling up, not a leveling down. By the middle of the 17th century, in response to increasing geographic and social mobility, the plural “you” had begun to crowd out the singular “thee” as the standard second-person pronoun, even for those of a lower social station. This meant that everyone would soon become, effectively, entitled — at least to the honorific second-person plural.

While modern activists argue that equality demands displays of equal respect toward others, the Quakers demonstrated conscientious disrespect toward everyone. Theirs was an equality of extreme humility and universally low status.

certain historical catastrophes or frustrations

As it happens, the rappers absolutely hated 'Planet Rock'.

Mary J. Blige comes through to moan about clipped wings and enemies

the DJ Mustard/HBK/Ratchet sound that has been all the rage over the past 18 months

the riotous Lex Luger sound dominated hip-hop in '10 and '11

Yacht Rap zone

mixtapes are too ephemeral

today its songs don't exactly work as party starters in any room where listeners aren't already familiar with them

a making-of feature on the album that ran in the same issue

That changed once it was established that not just rap, but specific works within the genre, would have a permanent shelf life. Since then, achieving this status has become a top priority

The Chronic, All Eyez on Me, and Get Rich or Die Tryin'

The flexibility and resilience of breaking is evident in the way it incorporated electricboogie and other new moves, rather than letting itself be replaced by them.

By now, the circular format has opened up so far it’s become linear, for greater theatricallegibility. Less improvisation takes place as well-worn popular moves become standard. As isoften the case in the development of a dance form, acrobatic transitions are elaborated, whilethe freeze, which once concentrated personal expression, competitive gestural dialogue, andgroup style into a single significant image, has dwindled away to almost nothing and sometimeseven merges with the exit. What once was a dance for adolescents is now the terrain of youngadults, professionals whose bodies are less gangly and whose higher level of skill is commen-surate with their years of practice. Group choreography and aerial spins, reminiscent of thespectacular balancing acts of circus gymnasts, have added to breaking’s theatrical brilliance,as has the influx of electric boogie, popping, locking, ticking, King Tut, the float, and other movesthat are not break dancing per se, into the genre

The folklore conference arranged a jam at a roller disco in theBronx, and soon after, Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver, the directors ofStyle Wars, shot a battlebetween the Rock Steady Crew and the Dynamic Rockers (later Dynamic Breakers) at a rollerdisco in Queens. The stage was set for the scene at the Roxy, a roller disco in Chelsea, inManhattan, that soon replaced the Negril as the venue for Wheels of Steel hip-hop nights.

As an integral part of hip hop, breakingshares many stylistic features with graffiti, rapping, and scratching. Like wild-style graffiti, itemphasizes flamboyance, and the embellishment of the tag finds its parallel in the freeze. Theact of writing graffiti is, despite its acceptance on canvas at the Fifty-seventh Street galleries,an act of defacement, and breaking, in its days before media hype, was an act of obscenegestures, a threat. In both graffiti and breaking, each piece or freeze is a challenge, a call torivals to try to top this, and at the same time a boast that it is unbeatable. Graffiti, rapping, andbreaking alike celebrate the masculine heroes of the mass media —Superman and other comic-book heroes, the Saint of detective book and TV fame, athletes, kung-fu masters, and greatlovers. The obscure gestural ciphers of breaking find their parallels in the (deliberately) nearlyunreadable alphabets of wild-style graffiti, the (deliberately) nearly unintelligible thicket of raplyrics, and the (deliberately) barely recognizable music that is cut up and recombined inscratching.

the twodance/sport/fight forms have the same roots

Breaking issomething new and original, born of American ghetto culture in the seventies and (in its latestmanifestation) in the eighties, but its basic building blocks are moves from the Afro-Americanrepertory,

The sense of inclusiveness, of allbeing in on a fun time together (“Everybody say ho!” “This is the way we rock the house!” “Iam! We are!”), of turn-taking, is there both in the rap and in the dance.

The structure of the rap, with its play of quick, varyingrhythms going on and off the beat within a steady four-square pulse,

The main thing about the freeze was that it shouldbe as intricate, witty, insulting, or obscene as possible. “You try to put your head on your armand your toenails on your ears,” explains Ken of the Breakmasters crew. “When you spin on yourhead,” says another b-boy. “When you take your legs and put them in back of your head outof the spin.” A dancer might twist himself into a pretzel, or strike a cocky salute. He would quotethe sexy poses of a pinup girl, or perhaps present his ass to his opponent in a gesture ofcontempt. Through pantomime, he might extend the scatological insult even more graphi-cally, pretending to befoul his opponent. Or he might hold his nose, telling the other guy hestinks. He might put his hand to his spine, signaling a move so good it hurts. Sometimes thedancers in the opposing crew joined in, razzing the performer from the sidelines.

Sally Banes

The only crews to survive from the late 70s early 80s were the Rock Steady crew, TheDynamic Rockers from Queens, and the Floormasters who then reformed to become The NewYork City Breakers. The Dynamic Rockers later changed their name to the Dynamic Breakers.The New York City Breakers and Rock Steady are obviously the most successful of all the crewsto emerge in the early middle 1980s.

Breakers like Buck Four, whose basementwas used for many breakdance meetings and get-togethers and practices on Decatur Avenuein the Bronx,

Kung Fu, with its imitation of animal movements,

The “Chuch Center,” famous for breakdance battles on 1159 Second Avenue in Manhattan,was one of the places where the “Nigger Twins,” “Clark Kent” and “Cool Herc” were known toappear for performances.

likeCool

Also made popular by James Brown were the bridges or breaks (in tempo and rhythm) insongs.

James Brown brought a quality toAmerican Black music which had been missing since tribal Africa.

The films and television shows that breakersare now appearing in work in very much the same way.

Therefore the Russkies would have to immigrate millions of Black Africans to Russia,and a few million Spanish, show nothing but Bruce Lee and Kung Fu films, wait a couple ofhundred years and then battle us!

He borrowed moves like drops, squats, sweeps, splits, tumbles,and flips and added them to his dance routines.

were digging on

In 1872 ragtime composer Arthur Marshallwas quoted as saying, “If a guy could really do it, he sometimes looked as if he was being towedaround on ice skates. The performer moves forward without appearing to move his feet at allby manipulating his toes and heels rapidly.” If that’s not an early moon walk, then what is?Or how about this? A dance that appeared around the turn of the century in Black minstrelshows called Stepping on the Puppy’s Tail also had an amazing resemblance to the moon walk.Stepping on the Puppy’s Tail was described as moving each foot alternately backwards “like ahorse pawing the ground.” It just goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun, or in thiscase under the moon.

Battles. Here’s another important connection to breaking that has existedthroughout American dance history. The competition. Every dance form done first by youngBlack men from the jiggy contest on the plantations of Texas in 1850 to tap dancing ofthe 20s to the jitterbug of the 30s and 40s to breaking today has always been about who wasthe best.

African dance was about leaps, hops, skips,falls, drops and turns done to unrelenting tribal beats and rhythms.

Roman style

n the spring of 1975 the 77th Street fountain in New York City’s Central Park was the placeto be.

The vainglorious boasting, sexual innuendo (recently labeled sexist), and mocking commentary on awide range of topics including social issues, racism, economics and politics have existed in Trinidadiancalypso for at least sixty years. Trinidian calypso, with its high level of improvisation and verbal dexter-ity requirements, was the most influential musical form in the English-speaking Caribbean until the early1970s commercial emergence of Jamaican reggae

It encom-passes a highly functional system of symbols that affect individual identity development,peer-group status, and intergroup dynamics and conflict.

Despite the many continuities and similarities to earlierdances, hip hop represents a clear demarcation between generations in ways previouslyunknown in African American dance culture.

this unpredictabilityhas a certain logic that calls forth praise and admiration

earth-centeredness

a rhythm-and-blues artist,

s well as traditional characteristics such as percussivephrasing, polyrhythm

I have also observed the use of tradi-tional opposition or counterpoint

Thisexuberance was fed by the celebration of the individual bound by in-group solidarity,community accountability, and cooperation

even watered down, hip hop’s influence will have profoundand enduring effects on American culture

ost mainstream Americans will never see the subtlecodes, gestures, and meanings of hip hop as they are displayed in African American commu-nities

confrontive

Movement into the mainstream negatedits status as countercultural by redefining it from a subcultural form to one widely acceptedand imitated, a move that inadvertently linked breakers with the society that had previouslyexcluded them.

Far more acrobatic than either preceding or subsequent hip hop dance forms, withoutcompetition breaking loses its thrust, its raison d’être.

(a recycled version of the late 1950s, early 1960s dance the creep)

Dance moves such as locking (later known on theEast Coast as pop-locking), the robot, and the spank, along splits and rapidly revolving spinscombined with unexpected freezes, were part of waack’s outrageous style

it was a purely male expression and rarely performed by females

and expectations of conspicuous consumption

By the late 1960s and early 1970s popular music and dance had become increasingly polit-ical as the industrial base that supported much black cultural creation eroded; the politicizedforms of popular music and dance were successfully challenged by the apolitical, slick danceand music called disco. Disco gave voice to a newly empowered economic strata, the yuppie,and the midlevel service worker.12Despite the social, political, and economic accomplish-ments that their grandparents and parents had struggled for, African American youth inher-ited economically unstable and eroded ground for their hopes and dreams. Vicious attackson all phases of the black movement deprived this generation of a viable social movementthrough which to work against their frustrations and for their economic needs. Where wouldthis generation of African American youth find employment? Where would they find theworking, productive male role models so necessary to the health of any community? Withwhat material would they create their dreams? In the midst of rapidly worsening social condi-tions, how could this generation find meaning in their community’s traditional music anddance forms as their predecessors had? Would they create utterly new dance and music formsthat spoke more directly to their unique experiences in a world without its former industrialbase? In this era of African American male economic insecurity, of popular conspicuousconsumption (e.g., the brazen display of designer labels and brand names), of widening gapsbetween rich and poor, and of a moribund social movement for black and minority inclu-sion, hip hop emerged

the politicizedforms of popular music and dance were successfully challenged by the apolitical, slick danceand music called disco. Disco gave voice to a newly empowered economic strata, the yuppie,and the midlevel service worker

many of them born of the sixties

his bent, flat-footed version of the dances might reflect a time when uprightpostures in African American dance were not well tolerated by white audiences

In contrast the cyclical nature of African American secular dance may reflect unique socialforces; the rapidity with which the dance vocabulary is recycled and renamed in AfricanAmerican dance appears to be a by-product of the ever changing U.S. commodity market,which continually demands new dance material

Jeffrey Daniels,ex-member of the pop-funk vocal group Shalamar, and choreographer Toni Basil were keymembers of the dance troupe.

By now, the circular format has opened up so far it’s become linear, for greater theatricallegibility.

choosing tags partly on the aestheticgrounds that certain letters look good together

The main source of the movement in breaking is black dance, but like the rest of hip hop,breaking is an exuberant synthesis of popular culture that draws on everything in its path.Some moves can be traced to the Caribbean, some to the black church, some to the Harlem ball-rooms of the twenties and thirties, some to such dances as the lindy and the Charleston, andothers to such diverse sources as kung-fu movies — which were immensely popular in theseventies —Playboymagazine, French pantomime, cartoons, comics, and TV.

and also includes dances from theCaribbean and South America

up-rock

a b-boy from the opposing crew would try to top him, or “burn” him

The entry, the footwork, and the exit were all pretty formulaic, with very little room forshowing off personal style,

The first article on the form, by Sally Banes with photos by MarthaCooper, appeared in the Village Voicejust before the concert,

Since May 1981, when Henry Chalfant presented the Rock Steady Crew at CommonGround in SoHo as part of a graffiti rock show

Or so the story goes.

The media hype about break dancing has changed both its form and its meaning. So to talkabout break dancing you have to divide it into two stages: before and after media.

Break dancing is a style of competitive, acrobatic, and pantomimic dancing. It began as a kind ofgame, a friendly contest in which black and Hispanic teenagers outdid one another with outrageousphysical contortions, spins, and back flips, wedded to a fluid, syncopated, circling body rock doneclose to the ground. Breaking once meant only dancing on the floor, but now its definition haswidened to include electric boogie, up-rock, aerial gymnastics, and all sorts of other fancyvariations

. And Michael Jackson had given the form national currency.

breaking is the newest part of hip-hop culture

Northwestern

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West.

The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity

young women tell me on college campuses

Bolivian peasants, in one instance 

On Native Grounds

habitus

internal reasons

Post-Veblen, the contemporary sociologist’s idea of the university’s purpose does not really differ in kind from the neoliberal version: to provide training in a specific field so one may get a better job and have a better life than someone without such training.

The Editors

Too Much Sociology

the bourgeoisie of the 1680s

cultural commentary, formerly known as “criticism,” and cultural production, formerly known as “the arts.”

cultural capital

which derived directly from Bourdieu’s maps of the field of power

but nonetheless fails to persuade us why we might want to take sides in the first place.

sociologized

its ever-rising prestige

sociology

How this happened may have something to do with the ambiguity of the demystification project itself. We can see the problem in the documentary about Bourdieu

a critique of the cultural sphere that views any claim to “expertise” as a mere mask of prejudice, class, and cultural privilege

few judgments about the independent excellences of works are offered, but everyone wants to know who sat on the jury that gave out the award

Foucault

And yet despite this perpetual reevaluation of all values, the underlying social order seems unchanged; the sense of it all being a game not only persists, but hardens.

In sociological living, we place value on those works or groups that seem most likely to force a reevaluation of an exclusive or oppressive order, or an order felt to be oppressive simply because exclusive.

This is why you must support upper-middlebrow Terrence Malick one day, and the next spuriously shock everyone with a loud defense of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

the idea that art mostly expresses class and status hierarchies

There is still, in other words, a space where the aesthetic may be encountered immediately and give pleasure and joy uninhibited by surrounding frameworks and networks of rules and class habits.

and for a nation that considered Bernard-Henri Lévy an intellectual

Not even university professors are as explicitly careerist as the author-ideal that literary sociology puts before us.

The form of this move can be glimpsed in Guillory’s explanation for the rise of French theory during the period he covers. Theory, according to Guillory, was perfectly in keeping with a “technobureaucratic” turn in intellectual work itself and in the economy overall: “The emergence of theory,” he writes, “is a symptom of a problem which theory itself could not solve.”

In the end, it’s irrelevant whether a degree’s additional symbolic value is provided by reading Shakespeare, pledging a fraternity, or DJing a radio show on the blues.

the Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan recently took issue with a self-congratulatory tone he’d noticed among educated elites when it came to their global-minded tastes, their ability to channel surf between high and low culture, European and non-Western