After 80 years of selling garbage adorned with the characters of a viciously anti-Semitic cartoonist, the Walt Disney Company has arrived at a conclusion: sticky kids and country folk in Donald Duck t-shirts don't have lots of money for the taking, elitists do. And elitists don't like their overpriced, useless crap to be covered with Goofys. Move over, Vera Wang, and say hello to Disney Couture!
The second-best column in the New York Times Magazine, next to The Ethicist, is Consumed. Written by Rob Walker, who claims to have created the term "murketing," and noted by the "$ / ¢" stamp, Consumed explains in just a few hundred words each week why we spend the way we do. (This week he told you why you buy a certain snack, because you believe it to be healthy, when it isn't really.) Walker's out with a new book, Buying In — that we'll file in on our Consumer Trend Books That Are Actually Interesting shelf next to titles like Maxed Out — which is like pages and pages of his excellent magazine column rolled into things called chapters and billed with the buzzworthy promise to take on a tour of the "consumer-persuasion industry." Who knew it'd be such a suspense-thriller? CONTINUED »
Editorial Director
