Avu Iz Mayn Shmok

An excerpt from Adam Mansbach’s hilarious new novel, The Golem of Brooklyn

An excerpt from Adam Mansbach's new novel, "The Golem of Brooklyn," a hilarious take on an ancient Jewish folkloric tale....

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Avu Iz Mayn Shmok

Irony and Historical Detachment

Analysis/discussion of pastiche in social media

This second interpretation is what I want to focus on. I want to show that instead of being a form of humor the graffiti in this image is representative of a strain of urbane, ironic detachment that has become pervasive in Anglophone cultures over the past decades. I want to ...
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Irony and Historical Detachment

Humor and the Social Condition

In a series of posts, Jeff Goldfarb and I have been sketching an outline for the study of the social condition -- the predictable dilemmas that haunt social life. We argue that one of the core intellectual missions of sociology is to account for the ways in which social patterns ...

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Humor and the Social Condition