About

Culture: An Owner's Manual is a newsletter / blog from Tokyo-based American writer, W. David Marx, to examine the social mechanisms that explain how culture works and why it changes over time.

Marx is the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (Basic Books, 2015), Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (Viking Books, 2022), and Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century (Viking Books, 2025). Over the last two decades, he has also written for publications such as The Atlantic, Popeye, Vox, The New Republic, Nylon, and The Fader.

His senior thesis on streetwear brand A Bathing Ape won the Noma-Reischauer Prize in 2001, and his Master's research on the Japanese music industry was anthologized in Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).