Category: ideas

What is Martha Cratchit thinking at the end of A Muppet Christmas Carol (and why hasn’t this ever been written about before)? “Your employer has brought an uncooked fourteen pound turkey to my house on Christmas day, and I am asking you, Bob, with my eyes because incomprehensibly the entire city, including some people we’ve never met, are now in our home, and are all expecting to be fed.” – Sentimental Garbage

Perhaps many of us – at least those who depend on Amazon and the wide world of other online shopping options – have forgotten, but department stores still exist. At least, a few do. “To study the decline of department-store retail is to study the erosion of the middle class. … Department stores provided one-stop shopping for consumers who had time and money to spend—just not too much of either.  But stagnant wages mean stagnant spending.” – The Atlantic

Roger Cohen misses the world of the landline. “In the landline world there was down time. You left the house, you looked around, you saw people, you daydreamed, you got lost, you found your way again, you gazed from the train window at lines of poplars swaying in the mist. Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity. It stretched away, an empty canvas.” – The New York Times

“We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.” – The Spectator

Good listening is not a matter of technique but of having the willingness to enter into another person’s life. Many bad listeners can’t be there for someone else because they are too locked into themselves. For them, everything has to be filtered through their own experience and concerns. – The New York Times

Like many of us today, the Soviet leaders misunderstood what humour is and what it actually does for people. Telling a joke about something is not the same as either condemning or endorsing it. More often, it can simply help people point out and cope with difficult or frightening situations – allowing them not to feel stupid, powerless or isolated. In fact, something the Stalinist regime failed to appreciate was that, because telling jokes could provide temporary relief from the pressures of daily life, in reality it often enabled Soviet citizens to do exactly what the regime expected of them: to keep calm and carry on. – Aeon

“Until quite recently, archaeologists mostly thought about the hardware involved in ancient food – the utensils people cooked with and the pots and beakers they ate and drank from – as well as the rituals surrounding a meal. Now there is a growing interest in what people actually consumed. Historical research into ancient diets can tell us about people’s historic tastes, lifestyle, wealth, health, class, gender and culture.” And sometimes actual dishes and meals can be recreated. – 1843 Magazine

“How will we remember the last 10 years? Above all, as a time of crises. During the 2010s, there have been crises of democracy and the economy; of the climate and poverty; of international relations and national identity; of privacy and technology. There were crises at the start of the decade, and there are crises now. Some of them are the same crises, unsolved. Others are like nothing we have experienced before. Some of them are welcome: old hierarchies collapsing. Others are catastrophes.” – The Guardian

What we do know is that Aristotle viewed the present as something continually changing and that by the year 160, the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius was describing time as a river of passing events. And in the West, at least, many would still identify with these ideas. But physics tells a different story. – BBC