Tag Archives: Culture

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing

The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

People my age are described as baby boomers, but our experiences call for a different label altogether.

By Bruce Handy, March 2, 2023

Article screenshot…

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence.

I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964.

When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored by moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.

Source: The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health

America’s culture war targets librarians – Coda Story

Librarians across the country are under threat as efforts to ban books about marginalized groups reach a fever pitch

By Erica Hellerstein, 21 December, 2022 

Daniella Zalcman

Amanda Jones awoke one morning in late July to the buzz of a text message. The air was balmy already — Louisiana summer weather. Jones, a middle school librarian with a slick brown bob, bright yellow glasses and the warm demeanor of someone who has mastered the art of talking to teenagers, squinted at her phone.

“You need to look at this,” a friend messaged her, with a link to a Facebook post. When she clicked on it, she began shaking and gasping for breath.

“My heart was racing. My blood pressure was through the roof,” she said. “I lay in bed for two solid days and cried so much my eyes swelled shut.”

It had all started that week at a public library board meeting. The meeting’s official agenda included a vote on whether the library should restrict access to several books that dealt with themes related to gender, sexuality and LGBTQ issues. Jones, who is also the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, decided to weigh in.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: America’s culture war targets librarians – Coda Story

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Television, Web & Technology

Why You Should Turn Subtitles On For Absolutely Everything – CNET

I use subtitles all the time. No matter what.

By Mark Serrels, Sept. 19, 2022 5:10 p.m. PT

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

That’s Academy Award winner Bong Joon-ho, quoted from a Golden Globes acceptance speech all the way back in January 2020. He was talking about subtitles, which, despite being completely necessary and helpful and beyond useful, are apparently hated by some people.

Bong Joon Ho: “Once you overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films” https://t.co/oWOsq8YtW4 pic.twitter.com/mJAJhEIH4U— Variety (@Variety) January 6, 2020

Almost immediately afterward, Bong pulled in a ridiculous four Oscars with Parasite — a fantastically made, multilayered dark comedy that delves deep into the underbelly of class divides. Parasite was an extremely deserving winner. You should absolutely watch this movie.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/why-you-should-turn-subtitles-on-for-absolutely-everything/

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Memories & History, Pleasures

What We Gain from a Good Bookstore | The New Yorker

It’s a place whose real boundaries and character are much more than its physical dimensions.

By Max Norman, August 6, 2022

The musician Peter Yarrow performing in New York’s McNally Jackson bookstore, in 2012.Photograph by Brad Barket / Getty

“Will the day come where there are no more secondhand bookshops?” the poet, essayist, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski asks in his new memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade.”

He suspects that such a day will not arrive, but, troublingly, he is unsure. In London, his adopted home town and a great hub of the antiquarian book trade, many of Kociejowski’s haunts—including his former employer, the famed Bertram Rota shop, a pioneer in the trade of first editions of modern books and “one of the last of the old establishments, dynastic and oxygenless, with a hierarchy that could be more or less described as Victorian”—have already fallen prey to rising rents and shifting winds.

Kociejowski dislikes the fancy, well-appointed bookstores that have sometimes taken their place. “I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery,” he writes. The best bookstores, precisely because of the dustiness of their back shelves and even the crankiness of their guardians, promise that “somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one’s existence.” With every shop that closes, a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out “more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit.”

Source: What We Gain from a Good Bookstore | The New Yorker

Books & Reading, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation | WIRED

The only people who absolutely disagree are, well, scientists. They need to get over themselves and join the fun.

By Jason Kehe, Mar 9, 2022 7:00 AM

Image Courtesy of W. W. Norton & Company

The best theory physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense.

It goes like this: In the beginning—the very, if not quite veriest, beginning—there’s something called quantum foam. It’s barely there, and can’t even be said to occupy space, because there’s no such thing as space yet.

Or time. So even though it’s seething, bubbling, fluctuating, as foam tends to do, it’s not doing so in any kind of this-before-that temporal order.

It just is, all at once, indeterminate and undisturbed. Until it isn’t.

Something goes pop in precisely the right way, and out of that infinitesimally small pocket of instability, the entire universe bangs bigly into being. Instantly. Like, at a whoosh far exceeding the speed of light.

Source: Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation | WIRED

Books & Reading, Libraries, Politics, Religion & Spirit

The history of the culture wars — from abortion to school books : NPR

By Ari Shapiro, February 2, 20225:00 AM ET, and Matt Ozug

A woman tosses a Ouija Board into a bonfire outside a church in New Mexico in 2001, after the church’s pastor urged parishioners to burn dozens of Harry Potter books and other types of literature and games they found offensive.
Neil Jacobs/Getty Images

America’s culture wars are creating a world of “magnificent heroes and sickening villains” as people fight a fierce battle in black and white, says writer and podcaster Jon Ronson.

Ronson said he watched his own friends fight in the trenches, often to their own detriment, and he wanted to know more.

So he set out to explore not just the culture wars themselves, but the humans behind the stories and how these fights began. Riffing on a famous line of poetry by William Butler Yeats that reads, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Ronson has released a new BBC podcast called “Things Fell Apart”.

Continue reading The history of the culture wars — from abortion to school books : NPR →