Susan Zieger, a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, writes about the cultural history of consumerism. She is the author of The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2018) and is currently writing “Logistical Life,” for which she has won a 2019 Visiting Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Susan Zieger
Advertisement
Writing on Public Books
Our Drugs, Ourselves
Is the term “drugs” still meaningful? Many of us would confess to being at least mildly dependent on some substance, be it single-origin coffee or Sancerre, antidepressants or anti-inflammatories, Red Bull or Ritalin. Because such a wide range of substances characterizes everyday middle- and working-class life, their indiscriminate lumping under the heading “drugs” is proving […]
Our Drugs, Ourselves
Is the term “drugs” still meaningful? Many of us would confess to being at least mildly dependent on some substance, be it single-origin coffee or Sancerre, antidepressants or anti-inflammatories, Red Bull or Ritalin. Because such a wide range of substances characterizes everyday middle- and working-class life, their indiscriminate lumping under the heading “drugs” is proving […]
The Vegan Resistance
In 2011, Oprah Winfrey asked her staff at Harpo Studios to take a vegan challenge: eat no meat, fish, eggs, dairy, or any other animal products for seven days. The episode, which has since enjoyed a robust afterlife on YouTube, included a visit to a Cargill meat processing plant, cooking advice from “veganish” self-help advocate […]
The World in a Blot of Ink
What might this be? A moth, a bat, a winged musical conductor, a spaceship? Whatever you may see, you are also looking at Card I of the Rorschach test …
