MetaFilter posts tagged with culture

A vast, sunny intellectual gulag

acb — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:05:37 -0800

Why Australia hates thinkers, an essay on anti-intellectualism in today's Australia and the populist hostility to “intellectual elites”, by Alecia Simmonds.

English and Dravidian

beisny — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:55:21 -0800

Many languages have "high" and "low" layers of vocabulary. But in most other languages, the two sets are drawn from the same source. By contrast, contact between Old English and French, Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, Japanese and Chinese, Persian and Arabic, and other pairings around the world have created fascinatingly hybrid languages. These mixed lexicons are, for linguistic and social historians, akin to the layers of fossils that teach paleontologists and archaeologists so much about eras gone by. Some people even think English is descended from Latin, or Kannada from Sanskrit. That’s frustrating not only because it’s wrong, but also because the reality is far more interesting. - The Economist, Unlikely parallels (via)

bigger than hip hop

four panels — Sun, 12 May 2013 10:49:54 -0800

“Used to steal clothes, was considered a thief/Until I started hustlin’ on Fulton Street.” The mean streets of the borough that rappers like the Notorious B.I.G. crowed about are now hipster havens, where cupcakes and organic kale rule and “Brooklyn” now evokes artisanal cheese rather than rap artists.

Just remember to obey the red man and get some qualifications…

acb — Sat, 11 May 2013 16:09:49 -0800

How to be German in 20 easy steps; also, from the same author: how to be English. Elsewhere: how to be a really hip German.

The Mothership Connection

Artw — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:51:05 -0800

Minister Faust explains the meaning of George Clinton's Mothership

In a City of Hipstercrites

shivohum — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:15:23 -0800

How I Became a Hipster (SLNYT)

Still far from that digital democracy any utopian could hope for.

iamkimiam — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:01:52 -0800

7 (well, technically 6) myths of the digital divide.

International Art English

The Whelk — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:33:26 -0800

"The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated. " - Triple Canopy magazine on why do artists' statments and press releases sound so utterly odd and confusing.

"Never, ever let anybody use your gender as an excuse."

zarq — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:55:06 -0800

"Women get flustered under fire. They're too fragile, too emotional. They lack the ferocity required to take a life. They can't handle pain. They're a distraction, a threat to cohesion, a provocative tease to close-quartered men. These are the sort of myths you hear from people who oppose the U.S. military's evolving new rules about women in combat. But for women who have already been in combat, who have earned medals fighting alongside men, the war stories they tell don't sound a thing like myths" Multi-page link to the article. Additional Feature * Women of the 101st Airborne Division: "As part of Nathaniel Penn's "Natural Born Killers"—an oral history documenting the experiences of American female soldiers on the field that marks the official lifting of the U.S. military ban on women in combat roles—in the May issue of GQ, we spoke to a group of female servicewomen currently stationed in Fort Campbell, K.Y. as they prepare for deployment to Afghanistan this spring. These soldiers were assigned to the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division roughly a year ago as part the Women in The Service Review program. The program first introduced women to historically male-held roles in combat arms battalions—an experiment, in part, to make sure that they could handle it. Mission accomplished. Here, five of them talk to us about past deployments, navigating expectations, and their changing roles in the Army."
Video * "Natural Born Killers: Battle Tested" * "Natural Born Killers: Battle Ready, Women of the 101st Airborne"

"the current system is the most practical and 'seems to work'"

Rory Marinich — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:56:10 -0800

"Despite her pedigree, success came slowly," the story bravely ventured. This slowness was maybe not so apparent to several thousand other 24-year-olds who want to be actresses, but who haven't even figured out how to get to a reading for Law & Order to fail at it. Tom Scocca on Nathaniel Rich, Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, and cultural nepotism. (Related: How David Carr Became the Daddy of Girls)

Weddings as Art

divabat — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:12:01 -0800

Weddings are inherently a form of performance art, and various artists have explored weddings as an artistic form. For example, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens held a wedding every year for 7 years to various parts of the environment and Maria Yoon held weddings in every US state to explore marriage as an Asian-American woman. Second Life also hosted a performance art wedding while Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis incorporated their House of Fairytales project into their own wedding. Kathryn Cornelius married and divorced seven suitors every hour on the hour while Chen Wei-yih opted to marry herself.

1993 -> 2013

zarq — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:28:18 -0800

For WIRED magazine's 20th anniversary, they've "gathered stories for, by, and about the people who have shaped the planet's past 20 years—and will continue driving the next."

Woman Photographs Herself Receiving Strange Looks in Public

Brandon Blatcher — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:52:57 -0800

Memphis-based photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long been aware of strangers making fun of her behind her back due to her size. So aware, in fact, that she has turned the whole concept into a full-blown photography project. Titled Wait Watchers, the series consists of Morris-Cafiero’s self-portraits in public in which strangers can be seen in the background giving her strange looks and/or laughing. More photos at her website.

The Japanese Version

Monsieur Caution — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 20:19:13 -0800

In the late '80s, documentarians Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker spent six months in Tokyo looking at how symbols and imagery familiar to Americans had been appropriated and given new significance in Japan. Though more than 20 years old, the resulting video remains popular in undergraduate courses across the social sciences and humanities in part because it's so entertaining.

Viewing guide distributed with the video.
Transcript of the video.
Viewing notes from Anthro 254 at Yale.
Critical commentary by a prof of Japanese history at Columbia.
Source for the DVD.

Trans 100

divabat — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:34:23 -0800

The Trans 100 is a list curated by We Happy Trans based on nominations of 100 key trans people breaking ground in American culture, arts, social justice, and politics. Autostraddle provides more information on the 51 trans women on the list, and Dyssonance, one of the curators of the list, talks about the deliberate focus on American trans people for this iteration as well as support for international-based lists.

Why Etsy Doesn't Have a Gallery in New York

Xurando — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:04:40 -0800

Does anyone here speak art and tech? "Indeed, for a certain sort of hoodie-wearing entrepreneur more keen on trips to Tahoe than the Tate, the rules of the art world can seem especially opaque." No, they are two different cultures. "The traditional art world appears to be recognizing that it is going to need to collect some of this money to continue operating in the manner it has grown accustomed to. What it doesn’t seem to recognize is that it may be selling the wrong thing, a brand of social status that the technology culture is not interested in buying."

Intelligence Tests

kliuless — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:40:00 -0800

Is Psychometric g a Myth? - "As an online discussion about IQ or general intelligence grows longer, the probability of someone linking to statistician Cosma Shalizi's essay g, a Statistical Myth approaches 1. Usually the link is accompanied by an assertion to the effect that Shalizi offers a definitive refutation of the concept of general mental ability, or psychometric g." Myths, Sisyphus and g - "Over the years I have not encountered a single endorser of Shalizi's article who actually understands the relevant subject matter. His article is loved for its reassuring conclusions, not the strength of its arguments. I am sure many 'thinkers' resisted Darwinism, the abandonment of geocentrism, and even the notion that the Earth is a sphere, for similar psychological reasons." Nuthin' but a 'g' thang

So I've always had the intuitive hypothesis that there are different types of intelligence; that different people tend to process information in different ways, whether due to habit or nature. But then there are all those people who say that intelligence can be boiled down to a single factor, the mysterious "g" (which I assume stands for either "general intelligence" or "gangsta"). Since this went against years of casual observation, I was somewhat pleased to see the eminent Cosma Shalizi write an essay debunking the notion of "g". But then I saw this blog post defending the notion of "g", and claiming that Shalizi makes a bunch of errors. Basically, the disagreement revolves around the question of why most or all psychometric tests and tasks seem positively correlated with each other. Shalizi points out that this correlation structure will naturally lead to the emergence of a "g"-like factor, even if one doesn't really exist; his opponent points out that if no "g" exists, it should be possible to design uncorrelated psychometric tests, which so far has proven extremely difficult to do. The latter post, by a pseudonymous blogger calling himself "Dalliard", contains a bunch of references to psychometric research that I don't know about and have neither the time nor the will to evaluate, so I'm a bit stumped. Normally I'd leave the matter at that, shrug, and go read something else, but I realized that my intuitive hypothesis about intelligence didn't really seem to be explicitly stated in either of the posts. So I thought I'd explain my conjecture about how intelligence works. In a nutshell, it's this: What if there are multiple "g's"? ...just imagine several dozen hyperplanes, and project them all onto one hyperplane... Remember that psychometric tests are simple mental tasks, but most of the mental tasks we do are complex, like computer programming or chess or writing. And for those tasks, learning and practice matter as much as innate skill, or more (for example, see this study about the neurology of chess players). Therefore, everyone can be "smart" in some way, if "smart" means "good at some complex mental task".

also btw To Make Mice Smarter, Add A Few Human Brain Cells (previously)

Turn the wheel and look to windward

Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:54:38 -0800

Two of our finest authors, humanist and government critic, Iain [M] Banks is dying of cancer. His next novel will be his last. His books are a source of inspiration and joy for me and many other mefites.

Yet another reason books are awesome.....as if we needed one.

littleap71 — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:37:18 -0800

Mining books to map emotions through a century. Emotion words aren't consistently used through time, it seems. Things got scary in the 80's.

"I thought I was the only gay person in the world for a long time."

zarq — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:19:04 -0800

The county where no one's gay. The 2010 Census of Franklin County Mississippi shows no same sex couples. (pdf). CNN videographer Brandon Ancil and human rights columnist John D. Sutter tried to determine if the census was wrong, and see if they could find gay men and women willing to speak about "what keeps them hidden." Video

The Bacon-Wrapped Economy

acb — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 11:03:40 -0800

The Bacon-Wrapped Economy , or how the rise of a new elite of wealthy, predominantly twentysomething, software engineers and startup founders is changing the San Francisco Bay Area's economy and culture. The economic effects of gentrification, of soaring costs of living and previous generations of residents being priced out are predictable enough, and similar things have been happening since the .com boom of the 1990s. The cultural effects of the rise of an elite who are in their 20s, oriented towards the internet, the counterculture and Ayn Rand-influenced market-essentialist values, and not encultured in the value system of the old money they are displacing, have been more interesting, from falling support for traditional art museums and orchestras in favour of hip street art, indie rock and the pursuit of “lulz”, and the decline of traditional philanthropy in favour of Kickstarter-style crowdsourcing, with its market-oriented values and continuous feedback, through to the attire by which the elite signal their status to those in the know, things like $100-plus “dress pants sweatpants”, which are at once superficially casual-seeming and yet expensive and discernable indicators of wealth and being in the know, through to an entire economy of disruptive service industries.

The Austerity Kitchen

the man of twists and turns — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:30:56 -0800

The Great Hog-Eating Confederacy

Early Southerners ate a rather limited and unvarying diet. At table the famished guest seldom found more than bacon, corn pone, and coffee sweetened with molasses. Pioneering sociologist Harriet Martineau complained that “little else than pork, under all manner of disguises” sustained her during her visit to the American SouthFor the most part, slaves observed the same diet as poor white farmers. Though many kept gardens, and thus supplemented their rations of pork and corn with a wide variety of vegetables, they had otherwise little opportunity to augment their diet.. Another traveler griped that that he had “never fallen in with any cooking so villainous.” A steady assault of “rusty salt pork, boiled or fried … and musty corn meal dodgers” brought his stomach to surrender. Rarely did “a vegetable of any description” make it on his plate, and “no milk, butter, eggs, or the semblance of a condiment” did he once see.

Christine Baumgarthuber is a writer for The New Inquiry and runs the blog The Austerity Kitchen. Austerity Kitchen has posts like: Night Moves

The hours that followed first sleep individuals passed in diverse manners; no custom or obligation imposed itself on this time between times. Ekirch writes that this period bore no name other than the “watch” or “watching.” Reluctant to leave a warm bed, many were content to do just that–watch. Others chatted with bedfellows, smoked pipes, comforted ill kinsmen or tended fires. Neighbors visited. Sometimes they broke bread. And frequently was the call of nature heeded. “When you do wake of your fyrst slepe,” counsels the medieval physician Andrew Boorde, “make water if you feel your bladder charged.”

Bundle Theory

Many thought bundling strange. One prominent New York physician called it a “ridiculous and pernicious custom.” Others blamed it for the precipitous decline in Yankee morals. But its defenders deemed it an economical and humane prelude to marriage. A couple bundled burnt no candles, they insisted, and other household members could rest easy knowing they had spared their visitor a tramp home in the winter night.

Baumgarthuber has also written pieces like: Our Daily Grub

Peppered, salted, sprinkled with finely chopped parsley, fried in butter, and dunked in vinegar, locusts make a dish whose savor is rivaled perhaps only by pan-seared stag beetles fattened on wine and flour. Browned meal worms served on a biscuit pairs well with woodlouse purée and is a terrific entrée for a main dish of grilled Buff-tip caterpillars or chafed chrysalides. Plump baked moth, oven-fresh and piping hot, is a dessert so surpassingly sweet as to upstage any visions of sugar plums that may dance in children’s heads.

Workingman's Bread

“How well can we live,” Juliet Corson asked herself, “if we are moderately poor?” On the radical origins of home economics.

Not By Bread And Marg Alone

Oleomargarine’s initial foray into the marketplace went anything but smoothly. Dairy farmers hated the stuff, and officials in the United States, Canada, and Australasia placed bans on the artificial coloring that made it resemble butter. This they hoped would render it less appealing to consumers. Such interference came to nothing; people grew to love the product, particularly those in pinched circumstances. In his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell notes the “half-eaten bits of bread and margarine” strewn about the lodging-house bedroom of his narrator, a downwardly mobile advertising copywriter turned bookstore clerk. And social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s 1911 study on unemployment quotes the diary of a “casual worker” (a man employed only intermittently): Tuesday, July 12.—Earned a shilling at wharf for working three hours. Breakfast—bacon and bread; dinner—bacon and bread; tea—margarine and bread. Wednesday, July 13.—Went out at 5.30 A.M.; walked round to several different jobs…. Breakfast—margarine and bread; dinner—dripping and bread; tea—kipper and bread, and not much of that.

"There was no return from apostasy."

zarq — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 07:11:10 -0800

Leaving the Witness. "In one of the most restrictive, totalitarian countries in the world, for the first time in my life, I had the freedom to think." The author is Amber Scorah.

sea & sky

kliuless — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:11:11 -0800

seaQuest: what if we could learn to live on/underneath the oceans (or in orbit)? [prev iou sly(er)] also btw... -Why Utopia? -Envisioning Real Utopias -Utopianism, Conservatism, Ideal Theory: Who is Trying to Get Where, From Here?

How African Feminism Changed the World

infini — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 03:43:06 -0800

'Feminism' has often been seen as a Western concept, but African women are increasingly redefining it to suit their own purposes. This, in turn, is influencing the rest of the world.