Generation Bubble

Mirror Moves: A Review of Rob Walker’s Buying In

Not given to overt polemicizing like Orwell, Walker peppers just enough editorializing asides throughout Buying In to let his readers know where he stands on murketing-inflected politics and everything else subsumed under his book’s subject. And these asides are what lead me ultimately to recommend Buying In. They rescue the book from the litany of anecdotes Walker relates of murketing instances that after a while become a bit repetitious, pointing as they all do to the same phenomena.

But it may be that this repetitiousness was exactly Walker’s point. Upon finishing the book, I was left with the single depressing impression that for all its dazzling technological wonders, the new world order coming into view is one that promises monotony — monotony adorned with various “Xtreme,” “aggro” or chic publicity spectacles, but monotony nonetheless.

The Unobtrusive Dinosaur: A Review of Wallace Shawn's Essays

Shawn’s book is not a self-help manual or a how-to guide, and he offers no precepts. Instead, he reveals his own struggle to make a life and the uneasy peace that he may or may not have found. The result is a demonstration that a life grounded in reality and guided by a continuous questioning of morality, reason and art can offer a true hope (a hope that is not reduced to a slogan beneath the smiling face of one of our “leaders”) that life and humanity are still possible. But Shawn is resolute that art, morality, or reason alone cannot offer this hope.