The relationship between the possessions we value and the narratives behind them is unmistakable. Current technologies of connection, and enterprises that take advantage of them, surface this idea in new ways — but they also suggest the many different kinds of stories, information and data that objects can, or will, tell us.

Read the column in the September 5, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Note: Earlier looks at a different sort of thing-story — the manufacturing “narrative” of an object — aret here and here,

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

At least that’s what I’ve been told. I don’t have an iPad, and I’m not even certain what I should link to.

But if you have an iPad, and would like to spend for $4 to enjoy this collection of factual comix tales of money and greed, then visit the, uh, iPad bookstore? Or whatever? And look for Titans of Finance. And then buy it. Or even if you don’t buy it, let me know that you found it, and maybe if you have a suggestion as to what sort of link I should provide.

This unlikely turn of events is thanks to the efforts of Garrett County Press.

Thanks!

(Related: Can the iPad save Spider Man?)

Insane Clown Posse mention Faygo a lot and spray concertgoers with it during shows. This has resulted in one of the longest-running instances of an unsolicited celebrity endorsement.

Read the column in the August 29, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Click it.

Recent feedback suggests I have not made this clear, so let me try again:

I’m not updating this site so much lately (though still sometimes, weekly at a minium) but I do post regularly, and quite a lot,  at (among other places):

http://murketing.tumblr.com

The riot of delightful “content” there is suggested by the image above.

AND

http://unconsumption.tumblr.com

The latter also features posts by my fascinator-collaborators. Great stuff. Again, I’ve provided a visual sampler, below. Check it out.

Click it.

Humans have always noticed novelty, but it’s harder to get our attention in the multicolored and abundant context of a megamart, where one heap of bananas looks much like another. This makes it all the more impressive that Chiquita has received so much notice by being creative with the little blue stickers that adorn its flagship fruit

Read the column in the August 22, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

A: Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are is in fact the same book as Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. The publisher thought it would be good to shorten the subtitle when the paperback version was published, because it would “allow for a less-cluttered and more powerful cover design.” Personally I thought the “secret dialogue” bit was the most interesting element of the title, but what do I know? Well, I know what I said when this was suggested: “okay.” It’s actually not all that unusual for books that are, shall we say, not best-sellers, to have their subtitles or even titles tweaked — Tyler Cowen’s last book came out in paper with a completely different title than the hardback version, to name a recent example. In any event, it is the same book; the only difference is that a few typos are corrected in the paperback version. If you recommend either, you should be fine.

N.B.: Questions in “Ask Murketing,” basically a new feature, though I may have tried it earlier, are real and verbatim, and selected for inclusion from email I receive because I believe the answer may be relevant, or of interest, to others.

And yesterday E (aware of my interest in the above) pointed out to me this promo image of the next Droid phone.

What do you think? Is that an intentional HAL reference?

You see the difference, right? I read “necessarily,” but it says “necessary.” Which is ungrammatical, obviously. It was a typo by whoever wrote the tutorial. But I missed that. And I wasn’t the only one, because even in the last page proof I saw, I was still reading it that way, and nobody had changed it — so we were all reading it, I think, as “necessarily.” But between the last proof and the column going to press, somebody caught the mistake, so it ran like this: “You don’t necessary [sic] need old antique books, just books with pages with a yellow tint.”

It happens that I have strong feelings about the use of [sic]. Hackish writers deploy this routinely to make whoever they are quoting look stupid. It’s a very cheap move, and a sure sign, in my view, of third-tier writing. It’s acceptable to use [sic] if there’s no way around it, and it’s sometimes excusable to use it if you’re trying to underscore the sloppiness, or stupidity, or whatever, of some powerful figure — if the president of an Ivy League school made a glaring mistake in some official context, maybe that would get a pass. But in general, [sic] is a cheap move — we all make mistakes, typos, little glitches, that mean nothing. This web site is full of such errors — for all I know this post will contain such errors, because I’m writing it quickly, and I don’t have a proofreader, etc. In other words, I’m no different than the person I quoted making some workaday, meaningless error.

If only I’d noticed it myself! I would have simply paraphrased: “You don’t necessary [sic] need old antique books, just books with pages with a yellow tint,” as “One doesn’t necessarily ‘need old antique books,’ the tutorial reassured, ‘just books with pages with a yellow tint.’” This would have achieved exactly what I wanted to achieve, without a distracting [sic] that appears to poke at some random person’s random typo. But because I failed to pay close enough attention, the latter scenario is exactly what came to pass.

I regret the error.

Omni Consumer Products Corporation, leading the way in making imaginary brands into actual buyable products (and written about Consumed a while back) has sent me an advance sample of its next big offering: Stay Puft Quality Marshmallows. They are caffeinated.

Yikes.

Look out for them…

Set aside any emotional attachment you may feel toward the reading of physical books; the truth is that creative uses for books that do not involve engaging with words on a page already abound.

Read the column in the August 8, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Yes, this column is the culmination of my long-running musings on this subject, here and here.