Category: ideas

“The wave of nostalgia for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and for the vanished halcyon America it supposedly enshrined says more about the frazzled state of America in 2012 and our congenital historical amnesia than it does about the reality of America in 1960.”

“Writers and artists have always been self-conscious consumers and filterers of experience, saving it and using it for artistic purposes later on. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter and Instagram incline more and more of us to respond to our experiences as only artists once did – perhaps in that sense the optimistic view that all of us are becoming creators is really true.”

“Differences in life expectancy between even adjacent stations can be stark. Britons living near Pimlico are predicted to live six years longer than those just across the Thames near Vauxhall. There’s about a two-decade difference between those living in central London compared to those near some stations on the Docklands Light Railway, according to the BBC. Similarly, moving from Tottenham Court Road to Holborn will also shave six years off the Londoner’s average life expectancy.”

“From the fiction of Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and John Dos Passos to the savagely critical paintings and etchings of George Grosz and Otto Dix, World War I reshaped the notion of what art is, just as it forever altered the perception of what war is. Although World War II racked up more catastrophic losses in blood and treasure, World War I remains the paradigmatic conflict of the modern age, not only politically but also culturally.”

“Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom?”

“Britain’s capital is, and always has been, a place that ferments cultural and scientific change.” Some research from and about the Olympics host: home-field advantage (boosts of testosterone might explain it), global warming threats to the city (the Thames Barrier, let’s say, is a little busy), and a lot more.

A growing body of research shows “that this emotion is a much more potent trigger for our behaviour and choices than we ever thought. The results play out in all sorts of unexpected areas, such as politics, the judicial system and our spending habits.”

“The popular appeal of existentialism lies more in its sense of drama than in careful analysis and argument. As [Adam] Gopnik exclaims: ‘Philosophers? They [Sartre and Camus] were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history.'”

The study “found that children between 8 and 11 years old involved in different types of group musical activities were more likely to develop empathy than those in control groups where music was not included.”

“If you want to know what a soldier’s life was really like in the Forties, pick up a dictionary of Services slang. Most of the words have nothing to do with fighting: they’re to do with gossiping, making tea, and waiting around.” And among the 3,000 new words in the latest edition of the Modern Chinese Dictionary are “fengkoufei (a bribe paid to a journalist to keep his mouth shut), Baijin Zhuyi (money worshipper) and fenqing (angry young nationalist).”