Worldly Goods | Content Section

From Teacups to Toilets

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Frank Brinkley

Behind the one-word title of a long book dealing with a single commodity there teems a rich variety of phenomena, events, institutions, individuals and values. Just four pages apart are two contrasting photographs. The first shows a one-room proletarian apartment in Berlin in 1913, so evocative of overcrowded squalor that it is often reproduced. The […]

Gardens of Emptiness

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Frank Brinkley

If there are svelte hoarders and corpulent minimalists, they don’t appear in popular culture. But not everyone who bulk-bought canned goods and toilet paper during our spring of pandemic discontent can have been corpulent or incontinent. Experts in psychology readily proclaimed that the instinct to grab in times of woe is universal. Hoarding is a default response to perceptions

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