The Converse brand survives -- divorced from its utilitarian roots, manically fashionable, a tightly laced blend of blend of canvas and contradiction.

The interest in Baghdad grudge matches has waned. In contrast, the interest in watching reality shows with American cage fighters trouncing lethal foreigners remains strong.

With more schools up in arms over T-shirts, it sometimes seems as if we'd like to ban our way back to a more sartorially decorous era.

Instead of making up delightful fictions about stars, today's publicists spend most of their time denying sad truths.

The beauty of the objects that we furnish our lives with has become so great that we're all human Walkmen headed toward aesthetic obsolescence.

The death of gadget worship.

Disney's new House of the Future has completely abandoned its techno-utopian roots.

Culture Wars entrepreneurs make their living complaining about the need to protect children from swear words and innuendo on TV shows that children mostly don't watch

Stars make jokes about their narcissism, but they keep showing up to the endless pageants like the Oscars that honor their extraordinary wonderfulness.

How Americans learned to stop worrying and love workplace testing.

As the presidential hopefuls all strain to define themselves as the candidate of change, Rambo croaks his single refrain with the consistency of Poe's raven: "You're not changing anything."

Presidential candidates stand no shot at the White House until they make an appearance on Leno or Letterman and prove to be at least as entertaining as a B-list Hollywood celebrity.

How self-righteous, empty-headed celebrities promote private charity.

Early random snapshots of pets have evolved into a tail-wagging, heartwarming universe of websites devoted to the cute and nothing but the cute.

What tweens find most appealing about Miley Cyrus, is not that she's some unique, unduplicable phenomenon of nature, but rather that she's so familiar, so easy to emulate.

Whatever Tatiana the Tiger's victims may have done to antagonize her, they did it for minutes, maybe seconds. The photo-parasites stalking celebrities do it every day.

When raging intimacy is the lingua franca even amongst strangers, a new market for intimacy enhancement emerges.

Today, every huckster thirsty for a crisp, all-natural revenue stream apparently believes that water is the just-add-water answer to his dreams.

How Kindle will change the publishing industry.

Before the X Games and the World's Widest Police Chases, there was Evel Knievel.