Culture Creep by Alice Bolin

From the critically acclaimed author of Dead Girls (“stylish and inspired”—New York Times Book Review), a sharp, engrossing collection of essays that explore the strange career of popular feminism and steady creep of cults and cult-think into our daily lives.

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

In “The Enumerated Woman,” Bolin investigates how digital diet tracking apps have increasingly transformed our relationships to our bodies. Animal Crossing’s soothing retail therapy is analyzed in “Real Time”—a surprisingly powerful portrait of late capitalism. And in the showstopping “Foundering,” Bolin dissects our buy-in and complicity with mythmaking around iconic founders, from the hubristic fall of Silicon Valley titans, to Enron, Hamilton, and the USA.

For readers of Trick Mirror and How to Do Nothing, Culture Creep is a swirl of nostalgia and visions of the future, questioning why, in the face of seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts as disruptive as the internet, we cling to the icons and ideals of the past. Written with her signature blend of the personal and sharply analytical, each of these keen-eyed essays ask us to reckon with our own participation in all manner of popular cults of being, and cults of believing.