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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

‘The thong is centimetres closer to areas of arousal,’ writes Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York, 2011–2019, ‘which means it is that much closer to the truth’ As any millennial who has ever tried to get ‘closer to the truth’ will know, it is not to be found in the places we were brought up to expect ‘With the naming of call-out culture,’ writes Stagg in a section on internet idiom, ‘we’ve had no choice but to become confused about who tells the truth’ ‘Without the moral compass of the newspaper,’ she recalls, elsewhere, of an early professional foray into new media, ‘we were all in some horrifying reality show about who is the most credulous at any given moment’ In the city and the decade that Sleeveless represents, what matters to bloggers, influencers, trolls, aggregators, ‘journalists’ and callers-out is not the truth of facts or of insights, but of traction: likes, forwards, follows, views Stagg, whose essays, op-eds and fiction of the 2010s the book collects, is personally intimate with this distortion In the decade that straddled her twenties and thirties, Stagg followed the growth of the internet’s traction-dependent ‘attention economy’ in a day job writing as a branding consultant There, she wrote for fashion brands, having known and grown tired of the financial struggle of writing, as a journalist and magazine editor, about them   The atmosphere of disorientation running through Sleeveless’s pages is sustained by two premises, each of which, Stagg contends, have tangled the lines of thought her generation (also my own) once followed as guides to life: the withering of print media, for one, and the marketing-driven impulse underlying everything that replaced it As Stagg briefly puts it, ‘[o]ur awareness of native advertising, artificial intelligence and data mining has impacted levels of trust in all forms of communication’ Fighting against this awareness, as she less briefly elaborates in essays applying her insights to the dynamics of contemporary fashion media, is a canny and uncompromising ‘comms’ machine In an analysis of the ‘Micro-Trend’, for instance, Stagg points

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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feature

Issue No. 17

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 17

An Englishman, a Frenchman and an Irishman set up a magazine in London in 2010. This sounds like the...

Interview

March 2016

Interview with Han Kang

TR. Deborah Smith

Sarah Shin

Interview

March 2016

Han Kang is a disquieting storyteller who leads the reader into the very heart of human experience, where the...

fiction

Issue No. 12

A Samurai Watches the Sun Rise in Acapulco

Álvaro Enrigue

TR. Rahul Bery

fiction

Issue No. 12

To Miquel   I possess my death. She is in my hands and within the spirals of my inner...

 

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