Tastefulness
Story Stream
The Bad Politics of Good Taste February 19, 2024
The concept of “taste” is hollow and vain. Made up of rules, codes, and biases that reduce the complexity of preference and desire to the dichotomy of good or bad, the idea imposes a hierarchy of virtue based on consumer decisions and lifestyle choic...
American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through Zines February 15, 2024
The first zine that I ever read was called Snotrag, and its author was a straight-edge hardcore fan, bike enthusiast, and occasional raver who lived in Vermont. I was none of these things; our main commonality was that we were both at debate camp. Sn...
The 38 All-Time Best Food Movies February 14, 2024
For just about as long as there have been movies, food has played a meaningful role in film. This history dates all the way back to the silent era and films like Mr. Flip (1909), in which a fed-up waitress who’s being harassed shoves a pie into the f...
Eat and Be Eaten February 09, 2024
The café was hers, and so of course it was named after her. I came upon Sissy’s late one afternoon in January of 2017, when I was young and careless and in Kamakura, Japan. I had spent the day wandering the hills (my photos are of graves, statues, th...
Home Is Where the Hedgerow Is February 06, 2024
Though its sincere title, if it promises anything, promises sentimentality, Hisham Matar’s new novel, My Friends, tries to serve a more refined taste for preciousness. The qualities are surely related, but precious writing enjoys ambiguity, and withh...
The Point of “Point Break” February 02, 2024
There are certain images that slither past good taste and politics and sink their teeth straight into the subconscious. For instance: a man dressed in a tuxedo and a Ronald Reagan mask, using a gasoline pump as a flamethrower. He is torching his geta...
The Cringe-Comedy Legacy of Larry David February 02, 2024
In the opening episode of the 12th and allegedly-for-realsies-this-time final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which returns Sunday night on HBO, a lady at a party gives Larry David a taste of his own medicine. Which, when I put it that way, sounds li...
