Category: ideas

After ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp’ won best song at the Oscars, it rocketed in popularity. “Why this song? Why now? When ‘white’ culture borrows from ‘black’ culture, it doesn’t necessarily borrow what it thinks it’s borrowing. The real meaning of the song, its reference to pimps, its role within a movie documenting the often pathetic efforts at stardom of a pimp who also makes music, isn’t particularly relevant. When a piece of cultural stuff makes the transition into the mainstream, it often does so on terms entirely different from what it originally meant.”

“It often seems that the English language is heading off in two separate directions. On the one hand there are the wild abbreviated inventions of texting, all the different pidgin languages that are born on the street corner when an ethnic language bangs into English and the technospeak of modernity. All these separate strands of invention are blurring together to create a new English with a hybrid vigour.”

“For the past three decades, Harvard’s reputation for preeminence has not always reflected reality in Cambridge. Who now thinks Harvard is better in engineering than MIT or Caltech? Who thinks Harvard’s Law School, hobbled by rancorous dissent, is better than Yale’s, Virginia’s, or Stanford’s? Its Philosophy Department, once the home of William James, C.I. Lewis, and W.V.O. Quine, is now typically ranked below departments at Michigan and Pittsburgh. Harvard’s relative decline is not entirely its own fault.”

Who writes letters anymore in the age of email? Except, maybe email makes us appreciate the written note more. “E-mail may have revolutionized our communication, making it faster, easier, more practical. But that doesn’t mean the handwritten note is dead. Instead, the act of putting pen to paper seems to have gained in currency. Now it’s what you do to say something special, or heartfelt, or really important.”

Music fans are uploading playlists they’ve created to music services and tagging them thematically. It’s “a phenomenon that some researchers predict will dramatically change the online music business before the decade is out. IMixes are the online cousins of amateur cassette-tape and CD mixes created over the years by countless music collectors as soundtracks for parties and road trips. Many of the playlists focus on a theme — and many of those on a personal one, whether the subject is a lost love, a class reunion, a nasty breakup, duty in Iraq or a new romance.”

“In the past 12 months, ‘social networking’ has gone from being the next big thing to the thing itself. Last month, MySpace, the site that famously propelled the Arctic Monkeys to pop stardom, overtook the BBC website in terms of visitor numbers. Along with competing sites Bebo and Facebook, MySpace has formed one of the fastest growing sectors on the internet.”

“Computer-speak is not just a dialect or vocabulary — it has grammatical principles all its own. That’s the claim in the current issue of English Today… But [the] suggestion that the grammar of e-English is new or different doesn’t hold up,” and Nathan Bierma can prove it.

A new study clearly designed to shock Americans into a higher sense of civic responsibility has revealed that more of us can name the members of TV’s Simpson family than can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. (Yes, there are five. Look it up.) In other stunning news, ArtsJournal has learned that more Americans are familiar with the work of Jon Stewart than can recite a Walt Whitman poem from memory.

“There are any number of Scots words still in common use, but most public discourse [in Scotland] is conducted in the language England still calls its own. It is still possible, meanwhile, to find any number of otherwise distinguished English academics who dismiss all claims for Scots.” So the question remains: “Is the leid a real language, or merely ‘the bastard offspring of a superior tongue?'”

“Scarred by violence and political repression, Brazil’s shanty towns have responded with an outpouring of art, music and film. But as “favela chic” becomes all the rage in the west are we in danger of glamorising slum life?”