Tag: culture

👓 Selfies at Funerals | The Atlantic

Read Selfies at Funerals by James Hamblin (The Atlantic)
A new Tumblr compiles self-portraits taken at funerals and shared with the world. Here are a few, interspersed with more traditional efforts at celebrating life and publicly reflecting on mortality.
An interesting and excellent follow-on from the prior story I read. Somehow the older mores of photographing and arranging the dead seem at least connected to those we’ve lost whereas some of these funeral selfies or so-called “caskies” they don’t seem to be mourning much of anything except the minute amounts of fame they may be losing.

👓 Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography | The Atlantic

Read Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic)
When photography was new, it was often used to preserve corpses via their images. An Object Lesson
Fascinating to read about some of the cultural shifts and norms in our society over the past century or so.

👓 When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday | The Atlantic

Read When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday by Ethan J. Kytle (The Atlantic)
After the Civil War, African Americans in the South transformed Independence Day into a celebration of their newly won freedom.

👓 Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian? | New Yorker

Read Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian? (The New Yorker)
When bilingualism isn’t obviously valuable, you have to decide what you think of the language.
A nice essay that focuses on the personal side of raising bilingual children. In my experience needing to have a reason to speak a language is very important. Often around the age of three (or the beginning of daycare and/or school) children who realize they don’t have to speak a language will give it up (and often flatly refuse) as they begin to become more broadly socialized. It definitely helps if they’ve got a peer group who primarily speaks the language as well.

I quite liked the parts about a language “filling one up” or the ways in which language was implicated with attention. These are intriguing observations.

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👓 How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk | The New York Times

Read How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk by Josh Katz (nytimes.com)
What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
I’d love to see the data sets and sources they used for these visualizations.

👓 Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? | Bloomberg

Read Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? by Alec MacGillis (Bloomberg.com | ProPublica)
Family and community are the only things left in Adams County, Ohio, as the coal-fired power plants abandon ship and the government shrugs.
A stunning long read here. The problems presented in this story are multi-faceted and are a good microcosm of some of the major complex issues that America is facing. There’s economic, cultural, and political.

I particularly find it interesting how very little that any politician was able to generally offer here. Unmentioned generally is the Trump administration which during the campaign promised to do more for the coal industry, but apparently those cries here have gone unheeded. I suspect that those who have been pulled into Trumpism will be generally left unsupported and will end up needing to change camps again. The real question is to where will they go for help? The divisiveness of the two party system will have to have some sort of change for things to get any better, particularly as the inevitable changes of globalization continue apace.

Also addressed here in part is the subtle changes in the “American Spirit” which don’t seem to be widely written about or reported on.

👓 Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | C Thi Nguyen | Aeon Essays

Read Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult by C Thi Nguyen (Aeon)

First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

A stunning essay that gives me hope that we’re not in a “post-truth” world. On the other hand, we’re going to need to do a lot of work …

hat tip: Ian O’Byrne

🎧 Season 2 Episode 6 The King of Tears | Revisionist History

Listened to Season 2 Episode 6 The King of Tears by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

Revisionist History goes to Nashville to talk with Bobby Braddock, who has written more sad songs than almost anyone else. What is it about music that makes us cry? And what sets country music apart?

Why country music makes you cry, and rock and roll doesn't: A musical interpretation of divided America.

The big idea in this episode that there is a bigger divide in America that falls along musical lines more than political ones is quite intriguing and fits in with my general experience living in South Carolina, Georgia, Connecticut, Maryland, Kentucky, and California. Having been raised by a Catholic family with one parent from the city, another from the countryside, and having lived in many blue/red states surrounded by people of various different musical tastes, I do have to wonder if there isn’t a lot of value in this thesis. It could make an interesting information theoretic political-related question for research. This might be the type of thing that could be teased out with some big data sets from Facebook.

Beauty and authenticity can create a mood. They set the stage, but I think the thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity.

—Malcolm Gladwell in The King of Tears

He then goes on into a nice example about the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses:

And specificity is not something that every genre does well.

This reminds me of a great quote in Made to Stick from Mother Theresa about specificity.

Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

There’s something very interesting about this idea of specificity and its uses in creating both ideas as well as storytelling and creating emotion.

There is one related old country music joke I’m surprised not to have seen mentioned here, possibly for length, tangential appropriateness, or perhaps because it’s so well known most may call it to mind. It plays off of the days of rock and roll when people played records backwards to find hidden (often satanic) messages.

Q: What do you get when you play a country music song backwards?
A: You get your job back, your wife back, your house back, and your dog back.

The episode finally rounds out with:

If you aren’t crying right now I can’t help you…

Thanks Malcolm, I was crying…

🎧 ‘The Daily’: Hong Kong’s Missing Bookseller | New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: Hong Kong’s Missing Bookseller by Michael Barbaro from New York Times

When the owner of a thriving bookstore in Hong Kong went missing in October 2015, questions swirled. What happened? And what did the Chinese government have to do with it?

On today’s episode:

• Alex W. Palmer, a Beijing-based writer who has reported on China for The New York Times Magazine.

Background reading:

• As President Xi Jinping consolidates power, owners of Hong Kong bookstores trafficking in banned books find themselves playing a very dangerous game.

• The Chinese authorities routinely coerce detainees into making videotaped confessions that serve as propaganda tools for the government and as warnings to others who would challenge the state.

• Lam Wing-kee, the bookseller profiled in this episode, plans to reopen his bookstore in Taiwan, a self-governing island that is supplanting Hong Kong as Asia’s bastion of free speech.

🎧 Season 2 Episode 4 The Foot Soldier of Birmingham | Revisionist History

Listened to Revisionist History Season 2 Episode 4 The Foot Soldier of Birmingham by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

Birmingham, 1963. The image of a police dog viciously attacking a young black protester shocks the nation. The picture, taken in the midst of one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous marches, might be the most iconic photograph of the civil rights movement. But few have ever bothered to ask the people in the famous photograph what they think happened that day. It’s more complicated than it looks.



S2e4 content
CREDIT - Bill Hudson, AP
S2e4 content 2
“The Foot Soldier” by Ronald S. McDowell
What a stunning and unexpected story. I do so love this podcast.

👓 Neanderthals produced symbolic art, research suggests | Cosmos Magazine

Read Neanderthals produced symbolic art, research suggests (Cosmos Magazine)
Grooves on an ancient piece of flint might have been made intentionally to encode information. Andrew Masterson reports.
An interesting synopsis though I suspect the paper is far more detailed.

h/t to @CosmosMagazine


bookmarked on May 03, 2018 at 09:03PM

🎧 Episode 10 The Satire Paradox | Revisionist History

Listened to Episode 10 The Satire Paradox by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History

In the political turmoil of mid-1990s Britain, a brilliant young comic named Harry Enfield set out to satirize the ideology and politics of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His parodies became famous. He wrote and performed a vicious sendup of the typical Thatcherite nouveau riche buffoon. People loved it. And what happened? Exactly the opposite of what Enfield hoped would happen. In an age dominated by political comedy, “The Satire Paradox” asks whether laughter and social protest are friends or foes.

An interesting dissection of satire and the effects it does (or doesn’t) have on society. Sadly, a lot of the best biting satire doesn’t have the effect that many of us would like it to have. How can we subtly change this to create more desirous effects? I’d like to delve more deeply into the paper he references.1 [pdf]

Some of this reminds me of the ideas relating to doublespeak that I’ve written about in the past, but here, it’s actually comprehensible and understandable.

References

1.
LaMarre HL, Landreville KD, Beam MA. The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report. T. 2009;14(2):212-231. doi:10.1177/1940161208330904