Category: ideas

“Parents worry a lot about keeping their children entertained. In the holiday season especially, the thought process goes: we are a lot older than their fun little friends, plus we both have a hangover. Must entertain little bleeders. Must entertain and improve. In fact, you could not be more wrong. According to research by Dr Richard Ralley, a psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk, Lancashire, boredom is valuable for children… What I would say, though, is that boredom is like olives, or antiques, or green vegetables, or black-and-white films. Children might get force-fed with boredom just in the run of things, and it might actively be good for children, but only adults will really appreciate it.”

There are times when a regular observer of journalism wonders what authors ever did before George Orwell came along to provide them with enough platitudes and philosophies to support whatever they happened to be writing about on a given day. Catherine Bennett suggests that Orwell has perhaps surpassed Jesus as everyone’s favorite quote machine. “In fact, to look at the places where his wisdom has been invoked recently is to wonder if there is anyone, excepting Stalinists, who would not think better of an opinion knowing it to be one that Orwell endorsed, or would have done had he ever got the chance to hear about it.”

There was a time when everyone pretty much knew what it meant to be a man, to the extent that anyone even asking the question would probably have earned a quizzical look. These days, manliness is as nebulous as concepts come, and Justin Davidson says that “masculinity is being constantly renegotiated, and men find themselves walking an invisible line, where self-assurance spills into arrogance, aggressiveness into bellicosity, stoic fortitude into cold indifference, sexual assertiveness into rapaciousness.”

Lest America have the controversy all to itself, Britain’s Royal Society, the UK’s leading scientific academy, issued a blistering attack on creationism this week. “A leading scientist compared it to the theory that babies are brought by storks,” and the Society warned that allowing the teaching of religious beliefs in science classrooms would irreperably harm Britain’s youth.

The nationwide rallies this week calling for equal rights for immigrants both legal and illegal made for some stunning pictures, as hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out in cities across the US. The experience has Philip Kennicott thinking about the meaning of crowds, and the sometimes contradictory ideas they embody. “The crowd image generally reflects the latent fears inspired by those who have gathered in the streets… Just as the eye scans the multitudes in a Bruegel painting, the lens scans the crowd, and finds it festive or restive, attentive or dull, emotional or over-passionate. But those are really metaphors: The individual stands for the crowd.”

“Spring at last feels sprung, and most Britons are gazing upwards, searching for blue skies. But not all – a growing minority are speaking up in defence of clouds. Cloud lovers now have a spiritual home, the Cloud Appreciation Society, with billowing membership and a UK website that won the recent Yahoo award for Weird and Wonderful Site of the Year.”

Grandiose pronouncements about the glory of the great open West aside, there really aren’t many places in America anymore that could truly be considered underpopulated. And when desolation does exist, it is rarely that poetic type of desolation described in flowery novels. More often, it is the quietly desperate solitude of a place like North Dakota, which has been losing people for decades, and may be on the verge of becoming America’s first wholly forsaken state. “But even as the American small town continues what often seems like an irresistible decline, some in northwest North Dakota are mounting a resistance, an organized effort to draw people — new people, young people, families — to their small towns.”

We all know someone who insists on buying all his new recordings on vinyl rather than CD, or banging out correspondence on some ancient typewriter long after everyone switched over to the latest version of Word. The technical term for these people is “pretentious Luddites.” But as Philip Marchand demonstrates, there is still great value in supposedly obsolete technologies, and for those interested in certain types of art, literature, and music, older may be the best, if not the only, option left.

Humor is universal, so they say, but quantifying it can be awfully difficult. For anyone to attempt to archive the history of American comedy, for instance, might seem like the ultimate quixotic mission. But Boston’s Emerson College is attempting exactly that: “The archive’s centerpiece is an oral history collection, which so far consists of videotaped interviews with 51 comedy professionals… Whatever their value to scholars, the interviews have a lot to offer anyone thinking about pursuing a career in comedy.”

By the time Serwan Serini was 30, he had founded the Kurdistan National Symphony Orchestra despite a near-total lack of arts infrastructure in his homeland in the north of Iraq. He had dreams of using his love of music and art to help craft a true national identity for his people. But the endless cycle of violence in Iraq drove him to the U.S., and now, from his home base in the Twin Cities, “[he] has a new dream — to open a school to give Kurdish children a chance to learn music in ways he couldn’t.”