Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Spare the spoilers
For millennia, we struggled with insufficient information. Now our bane is getting too much.
I speak, of course, of the spoiler — learning something before you wanted to know it, in a way that ruins the pleasure of the journey.
After all, when we consume fiction, we don’t just want a summary of the plot. You don’t get the same thrill reading a Wikipedia plot summary as you do letting it unfold. We like to enjoy the moments as they unfold, to discover twists and turns when the author intended, not all at once.
For example, I’ve never seen M. Night Shymalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” Why bother? I learned about the movie’s twist well before I even considered seeing the movie. I’d probably still enjoy watching it, but losing the thrill of figuring it out has sapped any motivation to go out and go see it. And in a world where there’s always another entertainment option, that’s a death knell.
Earnest and the Snarks
Want to get the zeitgeist of our times? Check the reactions to the Olive Garden review.
The story’s gotten seemingly everywhere the past week, but briefly: 85-year-old, semi-retired Marilyn Hagerty wrote a review of the new Olive Garden restaurant in her home town of Grand Forks for the Grand Forks Herald. The review was straightforward and unassuming, praising things like the “Tuscan farmhouse style,” the busy kitchen staff and the “warm and comfortable” chicken Alfredo.
Then, as Joe Posnanski put it, the Internet exploded.
Monday night miscellany, part 5
None of my longer posts are coming together, so I write short to break the writer’s block:
— Food for thought: The proposed Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would replace our current calendar — jury-rigged to fit the unequal revolution and rotation of the Earth — with a fixed calendar, where every day of the year always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas would always be on a Sunday. Americans would always celebrate their independence on a Wednesday, while the French would do the same on a Saturday a week and a half later.
To equalize out the calendar, Hanke-Henry would add an extra week every five or six years.
Moreover, they’d also abolish time zones. All time would be UTC — so when it’s 0700 hours in London and the sun is coming up, it’s also 0700 in New York City but the middle of the night, and also 0700 in Honolulu — and the late evening. 0700 hours would always be evening in Honolulu, just as it would always be morning in London.
(It’s unclear how Hanke and Henry expect people to function — whether they want people to continue working 0900 to 1700 every day for synchronization, even if that means people in some parts of the world become nocturnal, or if they want people to continue setting their schedules largely by the sun but just calling it different times, or some combination of both.)
It’s a proposal that’s a big step towards the “rational” and away from the “natural,” and I’m not sold at all that it would be an improvement. But it’s at least thought-provoking.
Monday night miscellany, part 3
Short thoughts (EDIT: after finishing, I can say my expectation of brevity was clearly unfounded) on interesting things:
— Many people, when I tell them where I went to college while making small talk, immediately ask the same follow-up: “Oh, and you majored in journalism at Grinnell?” Well, no, actually, I didn’t. Grinnell, as it happens, doesn’t offer a journalism program. It doesn’t even offer any classes in journalism. My education in being reporter came from throwing myself headlong into the student newspaper (one year as a writer, three as an editor) and then taking internships in the summer. Did my lack of a journalism degree impede my search for a job out of college? Perhaps a few hiring editors shuffled my resume into the “no” pile using “journalism degree?” as a filter, but enough didn’t that I got a second look. My clips and an interview made it clear that I knew what I was doing, or as much as a typical recent graduate does, and I got a job.
Moreover, when I speculate about the sometimes-dismal state of our industry, I’m never terribly worried. Even were I to end up unable to find a reporting job, I’m sure I could find a job someplace. I majored in political science, but the real skills I came away from Grinnell with were thinking and writing quickly and clearly. Those skills can take you a long way in a wide variety of fields.
I indulge in this tangent by way of introduction to an interesting article from Josh Barro in the National Review. Responding to a writer making a defense of classics majors who writes, “students of Arts and Letters do get hired, and they do go on to better jobs as they gain experience,” Barro agrees — to a point:
This is reasonable advice for students at certain colleges–highly selective ones–but is bad advice for the general public. Only if you’re at a top 10 or 20 school do you have the luxury of picking a major that does (not) give you job-specific skills and still being confident that you will find a good job after graduation.
Hollywood’s Rule of Pairs
Anyone watching the recent glut of sequels and remakes pouring out of Hollywood lately doesn’t need to be reminded that the movie-making capital of the country is sometimes a little starved of original movie ideas. It’s so bad that the rare idea gets immediately snapped up — snapped up, I’ve observed, by more than one studio.
It’s what I call the “Rule of Pairs.” Inevitably, Hollywood will take two bites at the same apple if it looks good enough.
I think I first noticed the Rule in 1998, when “Deep Impact” and “Armaggedon” hit theaters within months of each other, both about giant space rocks on collision courses with Earth. That same year, Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and Dreamworks’ “Antz” were each released, both computer-animated films about insects.
In 2001 Hollywood made the move into epic fantasy with two simultaneous franchises: “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter.” In 2004 the ancient Greeks were on the menu, with “Alexander” and “Troy.” Flash forward a few years and there were two movies about, of all things, author Truman Capote (“Capote” and “Infamous”).
Get off the reading rainbow?
It’s never an easy thing to hear someone suggest that something you love and value isn’t actually worth very much. But that’s the experience I had reading the most provocative article I’ve seen in some time, Marshall Poe’s “Death to the Reading Class.”
By way of background, if any word can be said to describe me, it would be reader. I learned to read very early, before starting kindergarten, and read heavily throughout childhood. While much of my reading then was mass market fiction rather than “Great Books” or interesting nonfiction, I still probably could have been characterized the heaviest reader in any school I went to. I read after school, before school, and during school — and not just in recess, to the eternal frustration of my teachers. I would rush through my assignments as fast as possible to pick up a book again.
My Sept. 11, 2001 memories
When the death of Osama bin Laden was announced in May, I wrote up a post on how that news resonated with me, compared to how I experienced the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks almost a decade prior. The death of Osama bin Laden, I wrote, felt like it brought closure to the epoch of time kicked off that dark Tuesday morning a decade ago.
At that time I was a sophomore in high school, shortly after the start of the school year. The first I heard was walking into my second period health class, where the teacher had her classroom TV turned to the news. It was clear that SOMETHING had happened, though I can’t recall exactly how much was known at that point. (This would have been around 9 a.m. Central Time, or 10 E.T., at which point both the south and north towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck. United 93 crashed around this time.) But when the second bell rang, my no-nonsense health teacher shut off the TV and started class.
Bookends of a decade
Collective events — events that everyone experiences simultaneously — are relatively rare. So it’s a mark of the times that we live in that one man has played an integral role in two of my generation’s.*
When I heard that Osama bin Laden was dead, I was at home, in front of my computer. It was a Sunday, a day off, and after putzing around for a big chunk of the day I finally settled down to write a long post about the new season of Doctor Who. I was making good progress when one of the D.C. journalists I follow on Twitter posted the strange news that President Barack Obama was going to make a speech to the nation at 8:30 Mountain Time — a half hour away.
I immediately knew this was unusual, and started running through the possibilities. The most likely cause for a such a short-notice speech, given what we knew, was something to do with Libya. Perhaps Obama was sending in ground troops. Perhaps we had killed Moamar Gadhafi? His son and grandchildren, after all, had just died in a NATO strike, so it wasn’t so outlandish.
Not my type
Periodically, something will make the news about astrology — say, that the traditional time periods for the Zodiac signs have shifted — which always reminds me, to my perpetual surprise, that people actually take astrology seriously.
Growing up, I always knew that my April 25 birthday made me a Taurus, and because they were next to the comics in the newspaper, I sometimes glanced at the horoscopes. But not for a moment did I ever think that the position of the stars when I was born could influence my personality, my interpersonal relations or my luck. Horoscopes were a joke for their vagueness — which is part of the source of the humor of The Onion’s horoscopes, which are absurd in their specificity.
Yet millions of people take astrology very seriously. I’m bemused by this, and can’t help but feel a little condescension. But am I really in a position to judge?
See, while astrology seems laughable, I do take very seriously another system that purports to categorize, describe and predict my believes and actions — the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Weirdos
From economist Bryan Caplan, this may be part of why I want to have kids so much:
…normal people can expect to be like their kids. But that’s not saying much, because normal people can expect to be like any random person they meet! The story’s very different for weirdos. By definition, weirdos never have much in common with random strangers. With a zero parent-child correlation, weirdos will feel equally alienated from their children. As the parent-child correlation rises, however, weirdos’ incompatibility with strangers stays the same, but their expected compatibility with their children gets stronger and stronger.
…
There are two ways to surround yourself with people like you. One is to meet them; the other is to make them. If you’re average, meeting people like yourself is easy; people like you are everywhere. If you’re weird, though, meeting people like yourself is hard; people like you are few and far between. But fortunately, as the parent-child correlation rises, weirdos’ odds of making people like themselves get better and better.
…
The lesson: As your weirdness increases, so does your incentive to have kids. If you like football and American Idol, you’re never really alone. You don’t need to build a Xanadu for yourself. But if you’re a lonely misfit, oddball, freak, or weirdo, then find a like-minded spouse and make new life together. Let the normals laugh at you. You’ll have each other.
Caplan, incidentally, has given issues of parenting some study — he’s in the news now for a new book (which I haven’t read) arguing that “being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think.”
