What does your taste in music say about your taste in illegal drugs? Quite a lot, if you believe the researchers behind a new study at the UK’s University of Leicester. “Researchers were trying to find out what people’s taste in music revealed about their lifestyles. They discovered that fans of every style of music had taken drugs, with those who preferred DJ-based club music topping the list.” Other findings include that more than 25% of classical buffs smoke pot, that blues fans are the most likely to have a driving violation, and that fans of Broadway musicals are the least likely to have tried drugs.
Category: ideas
Are America’s Great Universities Failing?
Education is suffering at America’s elite universities. “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”
What, Will These Hands Ne’er Be Clean?
Moral transgression eating away at your conscience? Try an antiseptic wipe. “Liars, cheats, philanderers and murderers … are human beings, after all, and if a study published last week is any guide, they feel a strong urge to wash their hands — literally — after a despicable act in an unconscious effort to ease their consciences. And it works, at least for minor guilt stains.” What are researchers calling this impulse? The “Macbeth effect,” after her ladyship.
Breaking News: Celebrities More Narcissistic Than The Rest Of Us
Scientific evidence finally proves it: According to a new study, celebrities score higher on the narcissism scale than the general population. “The study — soon to be published in the Journal of Research and Personality — confirmed that celebrities are more narcissistic than average Americans. And — surprisingly — they seem to start out that way, leading [the researchers] to surmise that narcissistic people seek out careers in the limelight, rather than becoming narcissistic when they earn fame.”
The Man Who Saved Geometry
“Geometry was, for much of the 20th century, a discipline very much in jeopardy. It was deemed by a generation of mathematicians to be old-fashioned, a fine recreation for idling away a lazy afternoon, but in essence little more than a trivial tinkering with toys.” But the enemies of geometry didn’t figure on Donald Coxeter…
Recalling The Pain
The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks will be inescapable this weekend, but how many tributes can we stomach? It’s a question that artists and musicians have been facing since the first days after the attacks, and the answer seems to be that it all depends. “Some genres are inherently more concrete and visceral than others. A television show or film might punch viewers in the stomach, while a novel or song taps them on the shoulder. The answer also has to do with the type of story that the artworks choose to tell, and whether the way that story is told makes us more anxious and afraid or offers some hard-won comfort.”
Battle For The Internet About To Enter Crucial Phase
“Telecommunications firms salivate at the prospect of eliminating Net Neutrality requirements and setting up systems where websites that pay for the service will be more easily reached than sites that cannot afford the toll. And U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who has for many years been a dominant figure in communications debates on Capitol Hill, is determined to change the rules so that Internet gatekeepers such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner, can create an ‘information superhighway’ for those who pay and a dirt road for those who fail to do so.”
When Collective Memory Goes Into Overdrive
Amid the nonstop anniversary commemorations of Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11 attacks, are nuance and the perspective of time being jettisoned in favor of instant history? “There are still 60 minutes in an hour, still 365 days in a year, but time gallops today. The cement of history cures fast. Maybe too fast. … The hopped-up environment generates its own vicious cycle of compressed-time demands: to cover an event, to analyze it, to memorialize it, to understand it, to produce the first feature film about it. It’s a daisy chain of rushed judgments.”
The New Critics (Or What Passes For Them)
“But they are tuning in to more than a musicologist’s online toy: services like Pandora have become the latest example of how technology is shaking up the hierarchy of tastemakers across popular culture. In music the shift began when unauthorized file-sharing networks like the original Napster allowed fans to snatch up the songs they wanted, instantly and free.”
Writing New Vivaldi
David Cope has written a computer program that can analyze composers’ music and compose new music that sounds like them. “Some classical music geeks enjoy listening for a composer’s signature tendencies and picking out the flaws in Emmy’s fakes. Others see the algorithms as an insult to the composer and the music. Once, at a conference in Germany where Cope presented some virtual Bach, a professor seated beside him bellowed his disapproval, declared music dead, and jabbed an accusatory finger in Cope’s face.”