Your cultural taste may, in fact, be conditioned by your education, profession, father’s profession, and aspirations to a certain social class. Mark Greif writes about unmasking hipsters and what taste really says about us.
“Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how ‘superior’ taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals,” states Greif.
This is a tough subject. How do we define ourselves? How can we live content with our place in life while aspiring to something better? What does an authentic, unpretentious person look like? Or to put it another way, does anything really matter? (Thanks to Mark Bertrand for linking to this.)
, describes four people surviving at the beginning of the recent American financial crisis. Aside from saying he will never do another book tour, he talks about the subject of his novel.