Double Exposure (8): Soul Food

By: Joshua Glenn

A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis (“It helps lower cholesterol”) and antithesis (“It tastes […]

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Double Exposure (7): Free-Range Children

By: Joshua Glenn

“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]

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Double Exposure (6) — Food Fight

By: Joshua Glenn

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]

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Double Exposure (5): the Zen of Leviathan

By: Matthew Battles

“My life is made up of so many other lives…. all of them rearranging themselves.” This advertisement for the Palm Pre smartphone promotes the curious Zen of being your own Dear Leader. Pajama-clad minions engaged […]

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Double Exposure (4)

By: Joshua Glenn

“I am the sum of my small steps,” announce the handwritten-style notes in an advertisement torn from a recent issue of Oprah Magazine. Ecce Middlebrow’s ideal American woman, forever in pursuit of a clear (un-anxious, […]

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Double Exposure (3)

By: Joshua Glenn

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy’d the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done… SO DEMANDS THE protagonist of Matthew Arnold’s 1852 […]

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Double Exposure (2)

By: Joshua Glenn

Speaking of brows. You know Cadbury’s 2009 viral ad, “Eyebrows”? The one in which two children — peculiarly self-composed, knowing, mysterious, alien-like children — wiggle their eyebrows to the beat of Freestyle Express’s “Don’t Stop […]

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Double Exposure (1)

By: Matthew Battles

Among the photos making the social-media rounds in the aftermath of the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam yesterday was this haunting image: It was posted on Twitter by @Serguei with a caption (in French): “It” […]

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