The inaugural issue of Ethos is out. Adrian Avery Archer (Columbia): The Rational Significance of Desire (Dissertation). Jens Beckert (Max Planck) and Jorg Rossel and Patrick Schenk (Zurich): Wine as a Cultural Product: Symbolic Capital and Price Formation in the Wine Field. Rusi Jaspal (De Montfort): Anti-Zionism and the Iranian Press. From TLS, a review essay on entomophagism by David E. Cooper. When "yes" doesn't mean "yes": Jarrah Aubourg on the problem of sexual consent obtained by fraud. Faking cultural literacy: Our cultural canon is determined by whatever gets the most clicks. Kevin Smokler interviews Gedde Watanabe on 30 years of Sixteen Candles and Long Duk Dong. Sympathy for the Devils: Michael Weiss goes inside the shadowy Washington PR network with ties to dictators' cronies, war criminals, and suspicious Ukrainian arms transporters. Our long national idiot-ambassador crisis is over. Who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman? Let the courts decide. Philosophy 101: "Isn't morality just, like, a social construction, and people's arbitrary opinions?" Alexander Zubatov on the most dangerous, devastating, insidious, invidious, ubiquitous and perfectly legal narcotic in the world. Hamilton Nolan on the mind-boggling industrial future of the Arctic. How sex rules our dreams: Gritty, emotional, smelly and dirty — new evidence supports Freud’s long-debunked theory that sex fuels our dreams. Pieter Ballon on old and new issues in media economics. Is Ahmadinejad coming back in from the cold? Golnaz Esfandiari finds out. This is what a gun looks like when it's pointing straight at you.
