Welcome to Urbane Sprawl
Hi, potential readers!
Welcome to my brand new blog, “Urbane Sprawl.” The blog takes its name from a column I wrote for The Harvard Crimson while I was an undergraduate, and the spirit is the same: taking a provocative look at social and cultural phenomena.
The column, whose archives you can read here, was particularly interested in using popular culture as a lens to better understand phenomena that at first blush (and perhaps second and third) seem to have nothing to do with pop culture. But, as I argued, America’s Next Top Model really can help us understand Erving Goffman, and Saturday Night Live might be the key to collective action problems.
Here, I won’t be restricting myself to the pop culture angle; but, given my interests and expertise (if obsessive TV-watching and blog-reading can be considered expertise — and I think it can), pop culture will surely rear its beautiful head often.
Many blogs follow the model described by Jason Kottke (see third item on the right), of Wunderkammers, cabinets of interesting things. Bloggers gather links to articles and videos that they find particularly meaningful, developing collections of curiosities to share with the world.
I want this blog to be purposefully about creating new ideas rather than collecting old ones. The model I’ll follow instead is Edith Wharton’s donnée book — her book of thoughts, where she scribbled down musings and meditations that later became the bases of books and stories. These posts will, I hope, present thoughts that could conceivably be the bases for essays and articles, most of which will likely never be written.
But that’s the point: to share these ideas and, potentially, insights, which somewhere, someone might find interesting.
Tags: america's next top model, collective action problems, donnée book, edith wharton, erving goffman, jason kottke, saturday night live, the harvard crimson, welcome, wunderkammer