Noah Smith at Noahpinion:
Marx, in my opinion, is a woefully underrated thinker on culture. His first book, Ametora — about the history of postwar Japanese men’s fashion — is an absolute classic. His second book, Status and Culture, is a much heavier and more complex tome that wrestles with the question of why people make art; it is also worth a read, although I think there are lots of things it overlooks.
Back in the spring of 2023, I met David in a park in Tokyo. We walked around, and he asked me what book I thought he should write next. I asked him to tell us where internet culture — and by extension, all of culture — should go from here. He replied that if he were going to write a book like that, he would first have to write a cultural history of the 21st century; if we’re going to know where we ought to go, we need to understand where we’ve been.
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is that book.
More here.
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