Category: ideas

“What is culture? Walter Benn Michaels argues that our respectful talk about cultures is just a way of preserving racialist thinking. He asserts that belief in cultures is based on circular logic (how do we know what practices belong to certain identities if there are no intrinsic identities for them to belong to?) but we cling to it out of an ulterior motive.”

Jean-Noël Jeanneney is president of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. And he has some big-picture concerns about Google’s project to digitize the world’s books. “Jeanneney, in short, looked at Google’s ‘boast’ on its Corporate Information page – ‘Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information’ – and thought, ‘Mais non. Not your job.’ And too important a task to be run by a company whose “dominant philosophy is still that of short-term profit.”

“Once, it must have been possible to have stood in front of a great painting and to have felt your world being slowly flooded as if by some wondrous light. Now, it is possible to stand in front of a great painting and to feel nothing more than: yeah, I’ve got the postcard.”

A new study suggests that religious people who believe that God can take over their minds and cause them to “speak in tongues” are at least correct that those in such a state are not fully in control of their own brains at the time. Another study proves that brains can like ice cream. “These studies play with the ticklish notion that our brain mediates all of our inner experience�whether we’re angry, or in love, or enjoying a vanilla ice-cream cone. Every feeling can be expressed in patterns of neural activity spread out on a computer screen. But does the specific pattern associated with enjoying ice cream tell us anything new�about the brain, or ice cream, or ourselves?”

To Americans steeped in the daily rhetoric of the Iraq War, the words “Islam” and “comedy” might seem jarring together. But even as the cultural chasm between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists widens, a new generation of Muslim comedians are attempting to bring everyone who falls in between the two extremes back to their senses, and to the basic reality that everyone loves to laugh.

“After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old. No services are planned. The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.”

“This will be remembered as the age in which the internet was still trusted… despite the fact that Wikipedia’s entry about Kazakhstan was recently amended to list Borat the fictional Kazakh reporter as president. [What once] promised to be a symphony of knowledge is turning out to be a monotone of static. When a computer and a search engine are considered as good as a degree, the result is a culture of shallow knowledge.”

Engineers in Australia – the home of rock legends including AC/DC and INXS – have developed a new T-shirt which enables the wearer to play air guitar and create real noise in the process.

“Every year, a handful of songs do much, much better than all the others, and nobody has much idea why. If the hits only did a little better than the non-hits, this unpredictability wouldn’t matter. But that’s not how it works. Only about one-fifth of artists end up making money for the label, and a few make so much that they subsidise everyone else, but you can’t tell in advance which ones will do well.” But new software hopes to have cracked the hit code.