Verbatim
Whether or not it’s because one of us goes to boot camps (it’s because one of us goes to boot camps), fitness is fast becoming one of our beats. In “Enemy Bodies,” Tom Buchanan looks at the socialization of the once-solitary exercise routine through the matrix of boot camps, big data, and social media, revealing that beneath the drive toward self-transformation lies the even brawnier force of social cohesion.
The phrase boot camp in its demilitarized form has long served to attach martial disciple [sic] to more quotidian forms of transformation: CEOs attend workplace boot camps to become better managers; web developers attend coding boot camps to buff up their HTML. These trade on the popular belief that intensive military training methods are irresistibly hardening, providing a time-tested regimen of “basic training” that can extract potential from even the most resistant materials.
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