Consumer culture and cultural criticism

How fast food reshaped farming, meatpacking, food science and low-wage work.

How slot machines are designed to keep gamblers playing longer.

America's opioid crisis from OxyContin's 1996 launch through Central Appalachia.

How American life changed between 1900 and 1950.

Arguments for consumers to question and take on the corporate superbrands.

The first book to expose OxyContin marketing; reissued 2018.

What Wal-Mart's scale does to its suppliers, its towns and prices everywhere.

How family luxury houses became conglomerates selling to the mass affluent.

How the cigarette rose in 20th-century America, and how its harm was proved.

Ethnography of auctions, fairs and studios.

Why football clubs are poor businesses but resilient assets.

How processed-food makers engineer salt, sugar and fat to make people eat more.

America's opiate epidemic, seen from the demand side of the OxyContin market.

The rise and fall of the American department store, with Sears throughout.

How the Premier League turned clubs into globally traded media assets.

Three false beliefs taught to young Americans, and how they harm their minds.

The economics of the music industry, where superstar markets show up in pure form.

A former distributor on the ideology that sustains recruitment.

The standardisation model that made the chain scalable.

A critical look at the arithmetic behind multi-level marketing pay plans.

The economics of positional goods and status competition.

How fashion became a branded consumer-goods business.

How Kodak's advertising taught Americans what to photograph.

How Las Vegas grew from the Rat Pack era into a family holiday city.

Business-press account of supplier and wage pressure.

The economic, political and personal costs of making and buying everything cheaply.

What Starbucks sells besides coffee, from visits to hundreds of its stores.

How free tap water became bottled water, one of the most profitable products sold.

How tobacco chemists engineered cigarettes, drawn from the industry's own documents.

How Star Wars merchandise came to outgrow the films that created it.

How Rudy Kurniawan faked rare Burgundy wines, and how he was caught.

The rise of the mega-galleries and the money in the contemporary art market.

How a West Virginia town of 382 people got 12 million opioid pills in three years.

Why multi-level marketing's economics need constant recruitment to survive.

Argument that rich societies have stagnated into repetition and sterility

How ownership of American agriculture came to sit with a few families and firms.

Essays on farm life in Maine, written after leaving New York City.

Following Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters through the 1960s counterculture.

Freud, Marx and Lévi-Strauss as cases of the Jewish struggle with Gentile civility.

Subtitled 'Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus'

Comic essays on a life from a Raleigh childhood to drink- and drug-filled college.

An analysis of Nike's brand-marketing machine at its peak, built on the swoosh.

Where the worry about others' judgement of us comes from, and how people overcome it.

A boy from a poor, broken home discovers football and rises to the NFL.

Essays on carnival hokum, magical thinking and Washington's cult of expertise.

Portraits of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment to helping strangers.

The gritty reality behind the hoop dreams of America's young basketball prodigies.

Two satirical essays on class, status and race in America around 1970.