Episode for March 1, 2021

Writer and Tax March Exec Director Maura Quint and Cultural Anthropologist Dr Grant McKracken


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Maura Quint is the a humor writer whose work has been featured in publications such as McSweeneys and The New Yorker. She was named one of Rolling Stone’s top 25 funniest twitter accounts of 2016. When not writing comedy, Maura has worked extensively with non-profits in diverse sectors including political action campaigns, international arts collectives and health and human services organizations. She has never been officially paid to protest but did once find fifteen cents on the ground at an immigrants’ rights rally and wanted to make sure that had been disclosed. She the executive director of TaxMarch.org

Dr Grant McKracken is trained as an anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Chicago), Grant has studied American culture for 25 years.

He has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and worked for many organizations including Timberland, New York Historical Society, Diageo, IKEA, Sesame Street, Nike, the Ford Foundation and the White House.

He started the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, where he did the first museum exhibit on youth cultures.

He has taught at the University of Cambridge, MIT, and the Harvard Business School.

He is a long time student of culture and commerce. Many academics prefer to look askance at interactions of culture and commerce.  He has explored this theme in two books: Culture and Consumption I, and Culture and Consumption II.

He has also looked at how Americans invent and reinvent themselves.  He had explored this theme in two more books: Big Hair and Transformations: identity construction in a contemporary culture.

He is the student of American culture. Plenitude published in 1997 looked at the new explosive growth of contemporary culture. In Flock and Flow, he shows how contemporary culture and commerce change.

Two years ago, he published a book called Chief Culture Officer with Basic Books that argues that culture now creates so much opportunity and danger for the organization that need senior managers who focus on it full time.  He is hoping this will create a new occupational destination for graduates in the arts and humanities.

This year Grant is affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

Grant and I spoke about his new book “New Honor Code”

 

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