Against Everything Essays

by GREIF, MARK

• ISBN13: 9781101971741
• ISBN10: 1101971746
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-08-08
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

The essays in Against Everything are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY:
The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada)
 
Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Author Biography

Mark Greif is co-founder of the literary and intellectual journal n+1. He is also currently an associate professor at The New School in New York.

Table of Contents

Preface

I
Against Exercise
Afternoon of the Sex Children
On Food
Octomom and the Market in Babies

II
The Concept of Experience (The Meaning of Life, Part I)

III
Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop
Punk: The Right Kind of Pain
Learning to Rap

IV
Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution (The Meaning of Life, Part II)

V
The Reality of Reality Television
WeTube
What Was the Hipster?

VI
Anaesthetic Ideology (The Meaning of Life, Part III)

VII
Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy, or Heroes Without War
Seeing Through Police

VIII
Thoreau Trailer Park (The Meaning of Life, Part IV)

Acknowledgments