Tag: 08.30.17

Is Japanese Culture Traumatized By Centuries Of Natural Disaster?

“As bad as they were, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami were just the latest chapter in a long, tragic narrative. The Japanese archipelago sits at the nexus of four tectonic plates, subjecting the region to more than 1,500 seismic events each year, including at least two 5.0 magnitude or higher earthquakes. As a result, Tokyo has been destroyed and rebuilt on average, from 1608 to 1945, once every five years. … The effects of centuries of natural disaster may be most obvious, though, in Japanese culture.”

How Our Brains Tell Time

“Different parts of our gray matter respond to different timing tasks, and brain imaging has helped us parse which areas do what. From drumming along with a musical phrase to figuring out how long a lecture has lasted, these specialized areas work together to shape our temporal perception.”

Why Have These New Science Books Become So Popular?

“The single most important element seems to be the ability to inspire awe. In 2010, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined the New York Times’s list of most shared articles and deduced that readers sought an ’emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation even in the face of something greater than the self’. Physics, and astrophysics in particular, seem well suited to this, but only a rare group of individuals has the ability, or the inclination, to bring about transcendence.”

Wild And Free? The Endless Rules And Bureaucracy Of Burning Man

“As with permanent cities, the construction and maintenance of this municipal infrastructure requires an elaborate regulatory apparatus—and for the greater good, the regs must be enforced. When you imagine Burning Man, you might picture naked people riding bikes and making out and setting things on fire—and, indeed, that’s exactly what you’ll see if you attend. But, for a psychedelic, safety-third debauch, Burning Man has an awful lot of rules.”

Can We Consider Some Speech Violence?

“For people who occupy positions of power in society, there may not be a single word they would ever consider violence. But that doesn’t mean other people can’t legitimately experience some speech as violence. And when people say they do experience language as violence, it’s not because they’ve confused speech with physical assault; it’s because the language-game in which the speech-act takes place is different.”

Which Pop Art Will Define The Trump Era? Enter Taylor Swift

Swift is a perfect, golden avatar of our moment, a child of the new century who understands celebrity as a form of constant curation of one’s brand the way that Madonna, a child of the old century, understood it as an act of persona creation. Whether or not she is a Trump supporter, she is an embodiment of Trump culture. And with this single, which broke a YouTube record in its first 24 hours, she has slouched in at the last minute to grab the title of Song of the Summer, or at least Song of the Summer We Deserve.

Mary Shelley Didn’t Just Invent The Science-Gone-Wrong Genre, She Also Pioneered Post-Apocalyptic Fiction In English

Frankenstein was not her only groundbreaking novel; in 1829, she published The Last Man, depicting England circa 2100 as a post-plague dystopia. “As with Frankenstein, Shelley was playing on some very real anxieties in Industrial Revolution-era society – anxieties that live on to the present day. And, just like with Frankenstein, she got flack for it.”