W. David Marx
@wdavidmarx
Author of Blank Space, Ametora, and Status and Culture. Newsletter at . Tokyo, Japan.
One of the challenges of writing a cultural history of the 21st century is that you have to recognize the following reality about what people see as "culture" today
The series "M. Son of the Century" about Mussolini establishes that '99-era Electronica is the sound of fascism
Each issue will go deep on a specific region. We started with the most remote area from Tokyo but one of my favorites: the Yaeyama Islands of Ishigaki, Iriomote, Taketomi, and Yonaguni etc.
Anti-anti-poptimists rushing to Google to locate random negative reviews of a book they haven't read to feel better after hate-reading a mildly-positive review of the book they haven't read
Bostonians/Cantabrigians: I'm at Harvard Book Store on Wednesday November 19 with author/professor Josh Lambert to talk about my new book BLANK SPACE www.harvard.com/event/w-davi...
Yet again @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social of Garbage Day manages to describe the roots of our global cultural predicament in a single paragraph. This is from today's essay on the manosphere turning against Trump: www.garbageday.email/p/the-great-...
I tallied the number of entries per year, and there's a steady and linear decline, with a very clear dip in the last half of the Aughts:
A clear value shift in films about Jordan Belfort's fraudulent brokerage Stratton Oakmont: Boiler Room (2000): the moral dilemma of ripping people off The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): the jubilation of ripping people off, because it's more noble to have been rich once than to have stayed poor
Hmm, appreciate the shout-out by @carlzoilus.bsky.social but not sure this is actually my point. There was a long stream of innovative *pop culture* in previous decades and it seems good to continue to encourage creators of pop culture to aim towards innovation for the good of the total ecosystem
Japanese men's fashion and culture magazine POPEYE began publishing in 1976, and now 49 years later, I helped the editors put together the first-ever all-English issue. This Tokyo guide is pure POPEYE: extremely deep recommendations and arguably the highest info-density of any magazine on the planet
BLANK SPACE Release Events SAVE THE DATE NYC: Nov 18 (Tue) at Greenlight Boston: Nov 19 (Wed) at Harvard Book Store More details soon
🎵 You don't need a hygrometerologist to know which way the humidity goes 🎵
My new book Blank Space is among the Washington Post's 62 most anticipated fall books www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...
Passive verb construction working overtime here, so here's an edit www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Yakitori Ramone for @jasondiamond.bsky.social 's next nonfiction book:
Brat only being 0.6 better than Addison's ersatz Brat is extremely bizarre
A very odd thing: In most consumer categories (food, coffee, beer, clothes), there's been a strong "ethical" pushback against corporate influence, yet the pro-pop music critics and the stans embraced the opposite idea, that the most artificial and industrially-manufactured pop is the most important