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Inside, I ran into Jay Knowles, the Music Row songwriter. (It was a small town in a big city.) We talked about Nashville’s recent reputation as “Bachelorette City,” for which he offered a theory: although more than a quarter of Nashville was Black, the town was widely seen as “a white-coded city.” “I’m not saying this is a good thing,” he emphasized, but tourists viewed Nashville as a safe space, a city where groups of young white women could freely get drunk in public—unlike, say, Memphis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.
Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville | The New Yorker
Emily Nussbaum
We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author. But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness—a gut-level suspicion that hard work, thrift, and following the rules won’t give us control over the story, much less guarantee a happy ending. For all that, we keep on hoping, and that persuades us to keep on living.
Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety
newyorker.com
In bringing together ideas of decentralisation, digital utopianism, and technological progress, right-wing libertarian ideology sets and shapes public discourse around digital currencies: “These terms and claims get further established, reified, and enforced as they are taken up and given legitimacy inside authoritative discourses such as law, policy, and jurisprudence” (Gillespie, 2010, p 356) This discourse maps onto recent enthusiasm for user-generated content, amateur expertise, popular creativity, peer-level social networking, and online commentary.
In Digital We Trust
nature.com
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