Category: ideas

New research is trying to determine what happens to a group when someone with different abilities than the rest of a group is added. “When my neighbor, classmate, or housemate is particularly smart, dishonest, or lazy, what does that do to me?”

Christmas is a tired brand. It’s been around a few years now, and needs a facelift. So a group of designers worked up a few new concepts. “The designers did their best, first identifying the three chief problems with the brand: it’s divisive, ugly and, of course, overcommercialized. Next they came up with a big idea to try to fix these problems. It was not to rename Christmas, exactly, but to streamline it by creating what might be thought of as an ‘overall umbrella brand’, one that sounded contemporary, hip and, most important, Internet-ready: x.mas.”

Has there really been any progress in art over the millennia? “To understand cave art, we must first radically adjust how exactly we define ‘primitive’ and then throw conventional notions of artistic progress out the window.”

Houston’s Third Ward, a decrepit and impoverished neighborhood, “may be [the site of] the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene.” The man behind the Third Ward’s budding reinvention is Rick Lowe, and his vision is wrapped up in the idea that “art can be the way people live.”

Scientists have discovered that positive sounds like laughter trigger positive reactions in our brains. “We’ve known for some time now that when we are talking to someone, we often mirror their behaviour, copying the words they use and mimicking their gestures. Now we’ve shown that the same appears to apply to laughter, too – at least at the level of the brain.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when blacks were nowhere to be found on American TV and movie screens, unless they were playing one-dimensional criminals. These days, blacks, as represented by the now-ubiquitous hip-hop culture, are everywhere in the mass media. But the incessant stereotyping is no less pernicious: “For all its universal cultural influence, hip-hop evokes the most negative representations of its creators – images of gun-toting drug dealers, the apathetic baby daddies, the irresponsible down-low brothers.”

Lasse Gjertsen doesn’ have any musical talent (he confesses), but he’s made a music video that’s become a monster hit on YouTube (1.5 million downloads). “To make ‘Amateur,’ Mr. Gjertsen recorded each analog beat and note one by one on video. He transferred the sounds from each video clip into audio files, which he could rearrange with the Fruity Loops sound-editing program.”

Happiness is a big question both for researchers and for policy wonks these days, so it is slightly discomfiting to reflect that people may not even know the answer to the simple question, “Are you happy?”

“The world is moving toward a uniform material culture, dominated by mostly material American influences: technological innovations, fashion, Hollywood and the celebrity culture it promotes, hip-hop, and rock ‘n’ roll. But the pervasiveness of the trappings of American culture obscures the central cultural paradox that lies within the globalization process: Although people around the world may wear, eat, and listen to American products, they continue to maintain their deeply ingrained values, beliefs, and underlying assumptions.”