Against everything : essays / Mark Greif.

Preface -- Against exercise -- Afternoon of the sex children -- On food -- Octomom and the market in babies -- The concept of experience (the meaning of life, part I) -- Radiohead, or the philosophy of pop -- Punk: the right kind of pain -- Learning to rap -- Gut-level legislation, or redistribution (the meaning of life, part II) -- The reality of reality television -- Wetube -- What was the hipster? -- Anaesthetic ideology (the meaning of life, part III) -- Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy, or heroes without war -- Seeing through police -- Thoreau trailer park (the meaning of life, part IV).

Over the past eleven years, Greif has been publishing superb, and in some cases already famous, essays in n+1, the high-profile little magazine that he co-founded. These essays address such key topics in the cultural, political, and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life--what might be the right philosophical stance to adopt toward ones self and the world. Each essay in Against Everything is learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious. They are the work of a young intellectual who, with his peers, is reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Mark Greif manages to reincarnate and revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation.--Publisher website.