36 Brunch
37 Renovations
38 Arrested Development
39 Netflix
40 Apple Products
41 Indie Music
42 Sushi
43 Plays
44 Public Radio
45 Asian Fusion Food
46 The Sunday New York Times
47 Liberal Arts Degrees
48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops
49 Vintage
50 Irony
51 Living by the Water
52 Sarah Silverman
53 Dogs
54 Kitchen Gadgets
55 Apologies
56 Lawyers
57 Documentaries
58 Japan
59 Natural Medicine
60 Toyota Prius
61 Bicycles
62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People
63 Expensive Sandwiches
64 Recycling
65 Coed Sports
66 Divorce
67 Standing Still at Concerts
68 Michel Gondry
69 Mos Def
70 Difficult Breakups
71 Being the Only White Person Around
73 Gentrification
74 Oscar Parties
75 Threatening to Move to Canada
76 Bottles of Water
77 Musical Comedy
78 Multilingual Children
79 Modern Furniture
80 The Idea of Soccer
81 Graduate School
82 Hating Corporations
83 Bad Memories of High School
84 T-shirts
85 The Wire
86 Shorts
87 Outdoor Performance Clothes
88 Having Gay Friends
89 St. Patrick’s Day
90 Dinner Parties
91 San Francisco
92 Music Piracy
93 Rugby
94 New Balance Shoes
95 Beards
96 Having Children in Their Late Thirties
97 Red Hair
98 Noam Chomsky
99 Non-Motorized Boating
100 The Boston Red Sox
101 Scarves
102 Cleanses
103 Self-Deprecating Humor
104 Integrity
105 Pretending to Be a Canadian When Traveling Abroad
106 The Criterion collection
107 Natural Childbirth
109 Native Wisdom
110 Trying Too Hard
111 Portland, Oregon
112 Free Health Care
113 Che Guevera
114 The New Yorker
115 Non-American News Sources
116 Subtitles
117 Premium Juice
118 The ACLU
119 Plaid
120 Platonic Friendships
121 Reusable Shopping Bags
122 Acoustic Covers
123 Dave Chappelle
124 Tibet
125 Nintendo Wii
126 Conspiracies
127 The Simpsons
128 Avoiding Confrontation
129 DJs
130 Carbon Offsets
131 Following Their Dreams
132 Not Having Cash
133 Adopting Foreign Children
134 LEED Certification
135 Expensive Strollers
136 Singer-Songwriters
137 Eating Outside
138 Books
139 Music Festivals
140 Glasses
141 McSweeney’s
142 Hardwood Floors
143 Bakeries
145 Cheese
146 Therapy
147 Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus
148 Dive Bars
149 Self-Importance
150 Rock Climbing
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my wife, Jessica Lander, for her love and support; my father, Richard, for giving me a sense of humor; my brother, Aaron, for pointing out my pretentiousness; and my three universities for the inspiration.
I would also like to thank Myles Valentin for his inspiration and brillance in writing about Asian Girls and Oscar Parties.
Photograph Acknowledgments
The numbers listed below refer to the entries (e.g., #1 is Coffee).
iStockphoto®: 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150
Jess Lander: title-page spread, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 20, 23, 24, 28, 32, 34, 35, 36, 40, 42, 46, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 71, 75, 79, 82, 84, 87, 94, 95, 115, 117, 121, 125, 127, 128, 137, 140, 143, 145, 149
Rebecca Shapiro: 27
Jill Schwartzman: 70
About the Author
CHRISTIAN LANDER is the creator of the website Stuff White People Like. He is a PhD dropout who was the 2006 public speaking instructor of the year at Indiana University. He has lived in Toronto, Montreal, Copenhagen, Tucson, Indiana, and now Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Jess, a photographer who contributed many of the photos in the book.
A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2008 by Christian Lander
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Some of the material in this book originally appeared, occasionally in different form, in the blog Stuff White People Like (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com).
Photograph credits can be found on Back Matter.
“Asian Girls” and “Oscar Parties” were written by Myles Valentin and are used here by permission.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-837-9
www.atrandom.com
Photographs on title-page spread by Jess Lander
v1.0
*1 Never replace Stereogum with Pitchfork, which is one of those things that used to be cool but is now not cool.
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