“Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish.”
Tag: 03.10
Do Comics Evolve?
“Garfield has had up to 263 million readers a day. Comics constitute a new art, just over a century old, and usually an unusually accessible one. So what can evolution add to our understanding of comics?”
Accentuate The Negative (Our Brains Do)
“Consider the following statements: ‘War continues.’ ‘No sign of peace.’ Does our brain treat these two sentences differently, despite their identical meaning? A new study suggests it does. British researchers showed that we are better at detecting words that carry negative meaning than those that are positive.”
Italy Cleans House At Culture Ministry
“Not only are nine high-ranking superintendents retiring [superintendents are the officials responsible for the state museums such as the Uffizi, for buildings such as the Coliseum, for archaeology and archives and conservation institutes, not to mention the much abused Italian landscape], but its top civil servant, Giuseppe Proietti, is also leaving.”
A Plan For American Museums (But Not Really?)
“The habit of baldly asserting aspirations–often ones sufficiently vague not to invoke dissent–and calling it a plan, strategic or otherwise, is uncomfortably common in cultural planning. In the case of the American Association of Museums, this is unfortunate, as there has probably never been a more important time for museums individually and collectively actually to plan, with intelligence, application and seriousness of purpose.”
How We Slip Up When Dieting Or Trying To Quit Smoking
“New research suggests that you may have succumbed to a cognitive distortion called restraint bias. Bolstered by an inflated sense of impulse control, we overexpose ourselves to temptation and fall prey to impulsiveness.”
Business And Social-Networking Lessons Of The Dead
“Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding how communities form across distances, because that’s what happens online.” It’s also what long happened among Deadheads. That’s only one reason academics are fascinated by the Grateful Dead, who also “famously permitted fans to tape their shows,” yet “did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights.”
Paulo Szot: From Broadway Heartthrob To Noseless (If Not Faceless) Bureaucrat
“I’ve been trying to sing at the Metropolitan Opera for many, many years. I covered a number of roles there. And now this opportunity – and such crazy music, such a crazy role!” The Brazilian baritone has been an opera professional for two decades, but finally gets a starring role at the Met – in Shostakovich’s The Nose – after winning a Tony for South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater.
Erotic Reverie Increases Brain Power, Creativity
“Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing – it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.“
Canine Ethics (It’s Not A Dog-Eat-Dog World)
“Morality, as we define it …, is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way [canids such as] wolves and coyotes play with one another.”