Posts Tagged ‘social class’

Caffè Latte Is Not What You Think It Is

August 23, 2014

Caffè Latte Is Not What You Think It Is

“Perhaps the latte’s most popular association, at least currently, is with a certain level of affluence. Conservatives complain about ‘latte liberals’ who are out of touch with the working class ….

But the notion that lattes are a sign of privilege may be off-base. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of English and gender and women’s studies … told Op-Talk that ‘the latte, while it may be attached on a certain level to too much upper-class food knowledge and pretension, it really is no longer an upper-class drink.’ She explained: ‘No matter how many kale salads Starbucks puts in their case, Starbucks is a fast-food purveyor.’ The latte, she argued, ‘is a high-calorie food that’s being pushed in an industrialized way largely to working-class people.’ And, she added, ‘it’s important to think about the explosion of all of these industrialized lattes, all these frozen lattes, all the Frappuccinos, as links to a larger problem of creating cheap, high-calorie, low-nutrition food for working-class people.’”

More:

“If You Read This, You Might Never Drink a Latte Again,” Anna North, New York Times

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Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-jyy

Image (“Lady with iPad, after Rafael de Penagos”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

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Newsweek’s Newest Writer: Ai Weiwei

August 30, 2011

NewsWeek's Newest Writer: Ai Weiwei

Two months after he was released from government detention, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has written an essay for the online version of Newsweek. It’s about economic oppression, human rights, and urban sprawl in Beijing:

“Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves.”

Read it here.

Short link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-b0B

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

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