Recently in Culture Category

"[N]obody knows who the faceless figures, who often appear as motionless couples are, or why they are turning up at high profile events. Theories include the possibilities that they are limelight-seeking pranksters, performance artists or that they are at the centre of a viral marketing campaign for an as-yet unknown product of forthcoming horror film." I, for one, welcome our new faceless overlords.

How do you say "St. Patrick's Day" in Spanish? A very happy Cinco de Mayo to you and yours.

Her 41 supermarket moment? As if I needed another reason not to vote Clinton: Though she may knock back boilermakers like us regular joes, the Senator has in fact never heard of Red Bull, the fantabulously addictive breakfast beverage which more often than not constitutes the best moment of my day. (This also means Clinton has lost another excuse for voicing her obliteration-happy nuclear ambitions last week...It wasn't the taurine talking.)

In other key findings: "Her fantasy date would be with President Abraham Lincoln [to which Sybil says back off!] She refused to choose between comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, said she likes both wine and beer, and wouldn't select either 'American Idol' or 'Dancing With the Stars'; she said her mother -- who lives with the Clintons -- keeps her up to speed on both programs." (The answers, as everyone not running for office knows, is Fey, beer, and neither -- both are garbage, not that I'd expect someone who prefers Grey's Anatomy to The Wire (as per Obama) and spends her free time trying to ban Grand Theft Auto to pick up on that.)

"The guy is sculpting the toddler id while also designing a domed metropolis with a monorail. How did this happen? A man who got famous drawing a cartoon mouse was now going to solve all America's urban problems?" Old friend Seth Stevenson spends a week in the realm of Disney, and lives to tell the tale. "After spending the past five days here, I've come to the conclusion that Disney World teaches kids three things: 1) a meaningless, bubble-headed utopianism, 2) a grasping, whining consumerism, and 3) a preference for soulless facsimiles of culture and architecture instead of for the real thing. I suppose it also teaches them that monorails are cool. So there's that."

We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're waterboarded. Uh...As part of a "team-building exercise," a Provo-based motivational speaker apparently held a waterboarding "in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe." We just took a big step closer to Brazil. (Via TPM.)

"The weather is appalling, the Christmas credit card bills are landing on the doorstep...and you've already broken your New Year's resolutions. But don't worry, if you can just get through today, things will start to look up." Once again, some depression experts hypothesize, it's Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Well, as with last time, I can think of worse, just around the corner...

"I really like my bacon crispy, but I fear it will get burnt too easily. That's a risk we all take. The price of great bacon is eternal vigilance." As seen at Looka recently, a very handy bacon decisionmaking flowchart. Hooray for bacon!

"'They started out watching me bust my ass, and I became part of their lives,' Knievel said. 'People wanted to associate with a winner, not a loser. They wanted to associate with someone who kept trying to be a winner." Robert "Evel" Knievel, 1938-2007.

"But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: 'After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.'" In the NYT, critic Edward Rothstein sings the praises and surveys the notoriety of "the green muse," absinthe, which is apparently making a legal comeback both here and in the EU. "Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world with seductive visions of another."

"If the current proposals to restart human exploration fail politically, indeed, the human space flight endeavor conducted under government auspices might well lose its momentum. I obviously hope that doesn’t happen. But it’s far from a slam dunk that we’re going back to the Moon and on to Mars." Two companion pieces to today's reflection on 50 years of Sputnik which I missed earlier: The Grey Lady hypothesizes about the next fifty years of space travel (suggesting its future as a public enterprise might be dubious) and takes a moment to consider the pop culture ramifications of the space age. "'At the level of government, I think we’re still struggling as to why we’re sending people to space,' Dr. Logsdon said. 'It’s a decent question, and I think it’s an unanswered question.'" (My answer to this question, for what it's worth, is here.)

This site's been languishing in the bookmarks for a good while now, but that doesn't make it any less hilarious. By way of mkh at Hidden City, Someecards.com, for "when you care enough to hit send." It's got exemplary Onion-like ecards for almost any occasion, and many, many ways to express the inexpressible. Hallmark, you are in a world of pain.

"To me, the 12 formats serve equally well as a weapon of defense for the consumer under assault from endless advertising messages. It's like learning how a magic trick works: Once the secret's revealed, the trick loses all its power." Old friend Seth Stevenson explains the twelve different types of advertising for Slate, with example ads for your perusal.

I'll grant I have as much morbid curiosity as the next man, probably more, and I'll admit to have found it interesting that -- judging from his ubiquitous Youtube-suicide dump (I'm sure y'all can find it) -- the Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung Hui, also seems to have recently seen Oldboy (and The Killer.) That being said, I'm with the families of the deceased: It was ridiculously offensive on the part of the press scorps to give this murderous chump his much-desired fifteen minutes, even after death, and to plaster his visage all over every media outlet for 18 hours like a two-bit Travis Bickel. CNN's clearly been trying to rectify by putting the victims on their front page at the moment, but too little, too late. I'm reminded of Sirhan Sirhan's famous quote: "They can gas me, but I am famous. I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do." Please, let's not play into these sick bastards' games anymore. I'm sorry Cho's life turned out to be a sad and pathetic one, but let him just be consigned to the ignominious dustbin of psycho killer history, where he belongs. He was a lonely, depressed, raging, and homicidal young man, who lost any claim to sympathy when he started randomly firing at people -- We're not going to understand him any better by throwing up his obscene posthumous vanity portraits in every nook and cranny of the national culture.

That being said, using Cho less as a poster-child for his own sick revenge fantasies and more as one for sensible gun control laws makes a little more sense to me. Now I understand that real gun control is sadly something of a non-starter in this country, and that mandatory gun safety training, for example, is the type of thing that might pay more dividends over time so long as the second amendment remains interpreted as it is. And naturally, the NRA is already ready to push back on any attempt to tie this awful incident to easy access to weaponry. But it seems abundantly clear: Whether we need a new law or just need to enforce the old ones, people who've already been declared certifiable by a federal judge should have a little harder time procuring two firearms than did Cho. Can we at least agree on that?

In the deadliest act of school violence in American history, at least 33 people lie dead at Virginia Tech after what was presumably a jilted student's bloody shooting rampage."'It is difficult to comprehend senseless violence on this scale,' said Virginia's Governor Timothy M. Kaine in a statement."

And, as details from this story emerge, I've been catching up over at Medley on the recent nightmare befalling blogger Kathy Sierra, who's been the recipient of sexually repugnant death threats as a result of her posting on, of all things, tech issues. (Not to say that posting on anything else would justify the depraved sexist bile thrown her way, but I've sadly come to half-expect that sort of vileness from Freepers, the uglier elements of dKos, and the like.) I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised by the disgusting misogyny pervading this latter incident -- it's sorta like people acting surprised that we've found a racist in our midst in Don Imus, as if bigoted old white guys in positions of power were a dwindling species or something. And, true, these two events have little or nothing to do with each other, except that I'm finding out about them at the same time. Still, I have to say, sometimes all the rage, ugliness, and despair that seems to lurk just under the brittle crust of our society is overwhelmingly disheartening. Let's get it together, people. To go back to Auden again, we must love one another or die.

Update: Exhibit C in today's litany of horrors, this ghastly assault on a Columbia Journalism grad student, which occurred not more than twenty blocks from here over the weekend. Sweet merciful Jesus, this is a sick, sick world sometimes. Update 2: They got him.

"The implication of these careful cultural signifiers: The caveman has grasped not just literacy and reason but also the affectations of the modern hipster aesthete. (That knowingly antiquated racket might easily have been stolen from a Wes Anderson set.)" Old friend Seth Stevenson ruminates on the proposed Geico caveman TV show for Slate.

"If you've never been listed in Wikipedia, you can always argue that your omission is an oversight. Not me. I've been placed under a microscope and, on the basis of careful and dispassionate analysis, excluded from the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever devised. Ouch!" Slate's Tim Noah discovers he's not famous enough for Wikipedia (at first.)

Love is a stranger in an open car...or is it just a much-needed dopamine fix? Somebody writes this story every Valentine's Day. Still, I guess it's something to keep in mind. (And sorry, Berk, you may be my Valentine again this year, but the same type of deconstruction applies to you. No hard feelings, bud.)

Beer for dogs. Glad we finally got that one sorted out.

"These examples help bring a crucial issue of plagiarism into focus. Behind the talk of originality lurks another preoccupation, less plainly voiced: a concern about the just distribution of labor." After reading Richard Posner's Little Book of Plagiarism, Slate's Meghan O'Rourke ruminates on the ethics of stealing someone's words. (Also seen at -- shamelessly plagiarized from? -- The Late Adopter.)

"I'm really sick of celebrities being dug up from their graves to sell us products. I was similarly upset when Gap used the image of deceased rapper Common in a Christmas commercial. (What's that you say? Common's still alive? Sorry, but after making that ad, he's dead to me.)" Old friend Seth Stevenson surveys the worst ads of 2006 for Slate.

A very happy Labor Day to you and yours.

By way of Dangerous Meta, a new NBER working paper finds that left-handed men make 13-21% more than their right-handed counterparts (although the same doesn't apply for women.) "The study is the latest to suggest there's something special about lefties. Other researchers have found that left-handers are overrepresented on university faculties, as well as among gifted students, artists and musicians." Update: Slate's Joel Waldfogel considers the results.

"'People are increasingly busy,' said Margaret Gibbs, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. 'We've become a society where we expect things instantly, and don't spend the time it takes to have real intimacy with another person.'" CNN delves into the broadening landscape of American loneliness, which, according to the NYT, is becoming particularly acute among middle-aged men without college degrees.

"Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don't require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks)." In Slate, old friend Seth Stevenson writes in defense of the word "suck."

"Surveys consistently show that Americans are viewed as arrogant, insensitive, over-materialistic and ignorant about local values. That, in short, is the image of the Ugly American abroad and we want to change it." Concerned about the "worryingly accurate" international stereotype of boorish Americans abroad, the State Department and several corporate partners create a handy etiquette manual for would-be world travelers. Some sample advice: "Listen at least as much as you talk. (By all means, talk about America and your life in our country. But also ask people you're visiting about themselves and their way of life.)" Hmm...can we get a copy to Dubya?

Happy April Fool's Day, y'all. Since I'm feeling lazy, I guess I'll recycle Toast in the Machine for the sixth year in a row. But funnier, fresher stuff can be found elsewhere: Google gets into online dating, Bradlands goes Madlands, Fluxblog self-promotes, and the Museum of Hoaxes offers the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all Time. Update: Wikipedia has a list of the day's hoaxes. (Via FmH.)

"Leave it to Justice Antonin Scalia to trigger a nationwide debate about the hermeneutics of chin flips." From an "empaneled jury" of Sopranos actors to Justice Scalia's uncharacteristic appeal to foreign precedent, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick muses on the sideshow surrounding the Justice's recent Sicilian kiss-off.

"Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative." A several-decade-long study by UC Berkeley professor Jack Block finds a controversial correlation between confidence in childhood and later political leanings. "He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial." (Via Follow Me Here.)

"The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. The year was 1968. Nixon won the presidency. The Beatles released The White Album. And home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, a Coloradan who had joined the company as director of research." (Propst would later deem his invention "monolithic insanity.") Fortune's Julie Schlosser recounts the ignominious rise of the cubicle as the bane of the American workplace. "The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence."

"For $800: DAILY DOUBLE!!!!: Thomas Edison is more famous, but this man's alternating-current system actually won out over Edison's direct-current variation." [Think The Prestige...Nicola Tesla.] The American Prospect's Michael Tomasky offers up a Jeopardy-style cultural literacy test in American history and political philosophy. (Via The Late Adopter.)

A new theory by Glasgow paleontologist Neil Clark suggests the Loch Ness Monster was more circus elephant than pink elephant. "'It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant -- the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible,' thought they saw a monster, Clark said in an interview Tuesday." Adding fuel to the fire is the 20,000 pound reward for Nessie's capture put forward by circus impresario Bertram Mills, who may well have rested his traveling circus animals along the banks of Loch Ness, in 1933.

A joyous Fat Tuesday to you and yours, and particularly to the scrappy, fun-loving residents of N'Orleans. Needless to say, it's been a tough year down there.

"It broadens the market, which is important to us because our whole business plan is about getting more people access to space...Space needs to be affordable for all in some way." For a small fee, a number of fledgling private space companies will soon send your remains (or personal mementos) into the cosmos, including Space Services, Inc., Beyond-Earth Enterprises, and ZeroG Aerospace. Families paid $995 to $5,300 to have their loved ones' ashes aboard SS, Inc's maiden flight next month, which sounds eminently reasonable to me given the usual financial costs of bereavement.

By way of LMG, an online exhibit on the response in comics to 9/11, featured on an intriguing site in its own right: The Authentic History Center: Primary Sources from American Popular Culture.

"More alarming were Richard Nixon's last years at the White House. After a good many evening martinis, he would call Henry Kissinger, and the secretary of state would grin silently as he passed around the telephone so that others could listen to their commander in chief's unbalanced ramblings. Since Nixon was in a position to blow us all up, this suggests a somewhat esoteric sense of humor on Kissinger's part." With the fall of Britain's Charles Kennedy, Slate's Geoffrey Wheatcroft very briefly surveys the sordid history of alcoholism in politics. (He could, I think, have done more with The Alcoholic Republic.)

"Our generation has envied our elders' experiences more often than we've questioned them. Growing up in the shadow of the '60s, we couldn't help viewing the political involvement of the age as nobler, the culture and the music as more vital, the shattering of social norms more exciting, than the zeitgeist of our own formative years." Slate's David Greenberg invokes popular culture's (and the academy's) rampant Sixties-ism to suggest why post-John Wesley Harding Dylan gets so little love.

"There's too much caffeine in your bloodstream, and a lack of real spice in your life..." Death by Caffeine, by way of DYFL. As a daily consumer of Red Bull, I'm comforted to discover that I'd have to consume 128 cans of said energy drink to drop dead on the spot.

"Money is a funny thing with hipsters. They exist in a state of perpetual luxuriant slumming. They drink blue-collar beers but hold white-collar jobs. Or vice versa." As seen on Slate, two choice essays on the Wes Anderson aesthetic and the cultural baggage of contemporary hipsterism (the former by a college friend of mine, Christian Lorentzen of N+1.) They said that irony was the shackles of youth.

"Just what does Tanqueray have in mind here? How is this foppish hipster supposed to sell gin?" Old friend Seth Stevenson assesses Tanqueray's new spokesman, Tony Sinclair, who has come to grace a number of bus stops and billboards in my area. For the most part, I think gin is pretty vile -- When it comes to the spirits, I'm a Jameson man. That being said, I did enjoy a glass of Victory Gin while re-watching Michael Radford's powerful version of Nineteen Eighty-Four over the weekend. Winston Smith...now there's a spokesman Tanqueray should get behind. Doubleplusgood.

Via Webgoddess, catpeople and dogpeople are going claw-to-paw over at AskMeFi. You can probably guess where I fall on this spectrum.

A very happy Father's Day to you and yours.

"A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as 'petite,' and it also helps if she's the kind of woman who wouldn't really mind being called 'petite,' a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality...Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage." The Post's Eugene Robinson deconstructs the "Damsel in Distress" genre so beloved by today's newsmedia. Obviously, if a friend or family member disappeared under strange circumstances, I might want some degree of media coverage in order to help find her. But, the amount of round-the-clock national attention devoted to these sad stories (and rubbernecking drek like the Michael Jackson trial) is patently ridiculous. Hey, don't look now, but our nation is at war right now.

"I like the act of writing on a newspaper. There's something transgressive about scrawling on the page -- right beneath Michiko Kakutani's turf. Also, I solve in pen (because I'm a badass), and the blue ink really pops from the dull gray newsprint. I find calming beauty in the look of a finished grid." In an article on the burgeoning sudoku phenomenon among gamers, Seth Stevenson comes clean about his crossword addiction. I'm with you, brother.

"It's the teenagers who work at the fast food places, and immigrant labourers who come across the border, working in the packing plants, and an executive. It's kind of from different perspectives. It's the different sides of the fast food industry." Richard Linklater discusses his next project, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which may star Maria Full of Grace actress Catalina Sandino Moreno. Sounds a bit like Traffic.

Howard Dean, meet Al Swearingen. 'Deadwood''s skepticism of government and celebration of individuality couldn't be timelier. And its viciously profane yet pragmatic demonstrations of tolerance feel more stiff-spined and American than an anti-defamation industry that has been enthusiastically adopted by the same conservatives who once mocked it." Salon's Matt Welch gamely makes the case for "Deadwood Democrats."

Crying while Eating. So much food, so many reasons... (including winning this hit-counting contest, which is why the site was created.)

By way of Supercres, here's a really neat time-killer: Omnipelagos, a.k.a. Six Degrees of Anything (on Wikipedia.)

A very happy Mother's Day to you and yours.

"I'd recognize The Dude's friendly growl anywhere. But almost no one else will...Why would Duracell pay big bucks for the voice of a Hollywood star?" In a world of commercial voices both gruff and soothing, Slate's Seth Stevenson delves into current trends in the voice-over industry.

"It was only a matter of time before this kind of thinking spread to history. Politics has always colored the ways that people interpret the past, but The Politically Incorrect Guide politicizes history in a new way, reducing all scholarly inquiry to a mere stance in the culture wars."

Slate's resident historian David Greenberg tears apart Thomas Woods' enormously popular conservative hatchet-job of US history, and pins the blame for its ilk on a Faustian bargain made by right-wing intellectuals: "Conservatives who believe in open intellectual pursuit understandably blanch at the popularity of a book like this. The problem, however, isn't a lone piece of agitprop but a cynical alliance that conservative intellectuals forged with those who hold their ideals of scholarship in contempt. It's not surprising that the anti-intellectual currents they've aligned themselves with are proving too powerful for them to control."

By way of Pickle in the City, the Baby Name Wizard is a fun tool that helps you trace the popularity of a given name over the course of the twentieth century. (For what it's worth, Kevin topped out in the '60s.)

They can finally rest easy in Don's Resale Shop. After 67 years in the wilderness, the buffalo nickel is back for the '05. (And here I am still way behind on my state quarters...)

"'I'm sorry, sir,' he said to me. 'I'm sorry for what she's done." As pointed out in lecture this afternoon, today's NY Times includes an editorial on the corporate divulging of ties to Antebellum slavery, spurred by this recent letter of apology at JP Morgan-Chase: "We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined. Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse. We apologize to the American public, and particularly to African-Americans, for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played during that period." Interesting...research projects into corporate complicity such as this one will hopefully add further impetus for the creation of a National Slavery Museum in the relatively near future -- As a whole, we Americans should do a better job in recognizing and remembering our national Original Sin, and I think such a museum would be a great step in that direction. (In fact, the museum really should be on the Mall, not in Fredericksburg, VA.)

Be careful out there, y'all: A British psychologist has run the numbers and deemed that today, Jan. 24, is the most depressing day of the year. Hmmm. It's early yet, but I can think of worse. Perhaps someone should acquaint the good professor with last November's election, or, for that matter, Valentine's Day.

What?!? Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi used steroids?! Man, I've been thinking all this time that they both just subscribed to a rigorous neck-thickening regimen. (Next thing you'll be telling me there's no WMDs in Iraq.) Well, I guess odds were that at least a few members of the medicated 44% in America would play baseball.

Hoo boy, the Red Staters obsessed with "moral values" out there are just gonna love Kinsey. With its unflinching recognition of myriad forms of human sexual behavior, its intimations of bisexuality and wife-swapping among team Kinsey, and its occasionally graphic (albeit antiseptic and not at all titillating) depictions of the act of coitus (to channel Maude Lebowski), Bill Condon's biopic of Indiana's famous sex statistician is the closest movie we have this year to a Passion of the Christ for science-minded free-thinkers. In fact, the film seems almost genetically designed to get under the skins of the abstinence-firsters and moralist types who've decried Kinsey's studies for fifty years.

That being said, the strength of Kinsey, and what elevates it to being a better-then-average biopic, is the way it ultimately gets under everybody's skin. Alfred Kinsey is not simply white-washed as a martyr to science and a hero of sexual enlightenment (although, in its most conventional moments, such as the last ten minutes, the movie hammers those particular points pretty hard.) Rather, Kinsey is portrayed as a man whose relentless pursuit of sexual knowledge often leads him down some troubling and morally ambiguous roads. Even the most open-minded libertines in the audience may find themselves feeling that things seem to have gotten a little out-of-control around the home office in Indiana by the end, and get extremely discomfited when Liam Neeson's Kinsey sits down with an even creepier than usual Bill Sadler, a pedophile and sexual predator who's taken some notes of his own.

Kinsey is at its best when it rides this razor's edge, honoring the professor's undeniable contributions to science and society while recognizing that his dispassionately treating sexual behavior as he earlier treated gall wasps ultimately opened the door to immense personal pitfalls, particularly for the men and women around him who had trouble maintaining such a scientific distance. Speaking of which, while Neeson is solid and Laura Linney is Laura Linney as usual, the supporting character work in Kinsey is particularly good. Special marks go to a fearless Peter Saarsgard as Kinsey's #2 (Watch out, Ewan - you've got a competitor now for the full-frontal roles), John Lithgow for his bleary final scene as Kinsey's father (which redeemed an otherwise one-note character), and Dylan Baker as the long-suffering Rockefeller Foundation point person (who must partly have been picked here for his memorable role in Happiness.)

In sum, although it ends with a rather bland huzzah for the march of science, Bill Condon's Kinsey is for the most part an intelligent, nuanced, and multifaceted appreciation of one man's probing (and occasionally perilous) quest to illuminate humankind's most intimate frontier. (And as such, it'll probably go over like a lead balloon in American Pie country.)

Along the same lines, Slate's Seth Stevenson scrutinizes the return of the (Burger) King.

The mystery of the grassy knoll has finally been solved, and the second shooter was...John Wilkes Booth?! For the first time in an age, I took advantage of the New York theater sce