Archive for the ‘The Culture’ Category
Map of the Day
Old New York City map. More here.
Paris v. New York
Filed under: All Those Other Places, The Culture | Tags: New York, Paris
Leave a Comment A french blog devoted to visual comparisons:
University Students and the GOP
Filed under: The Culture | Tags: Republicans, Students, The Young
Leave a Comment David Frum has a good post about why the GOP has so much trouble with top university students:
Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.
It’s worth reading full. Kevin Drum has a simpler explanation:
Older voters might be willing to accept Republican incoherence simply because it’s in their interest to do so and they don’t really care if the arguments make sense, but younger voters don’t have that same motivation. Republican magical thinking doesn’t really benefit them, so they’re just repelled by it.
It’s not just that Republican magical thinking doesn’t directly benefit young people in any tangible way. The bigger problem is that, values aside, this magical thinking is so easy to knock down. At universities where a bunch of bright young people are getting into late-night bull sessions by night and reading academic literature by day, these arguments have no chance of gaining traction. They fall down under any empirical attack. I don’t think politicians need to go around saying the most intellectually daring arguments out there, but they should have some substance behind them. Republicans increasingly rely on glass house arguments. Ambitious kids who think they know much more than they do are going to throw rocks. It would take someone with a lot fortitude to constantly want to play that sort of defense with your peer group.
Increasingly in my life, I simply end conversations when they veer into Republican fantasyland. I’m not going to argue about whether the Bush tax cuts added to the deficit or not. Either you base arguments on widely accepted factual premises or you don’t.
Hipsters!
Mark Grief has a great article about hipsterism. He ends by pointing towards the possible future:
In recent hipster art, Animal Collective’s best-known lyric is this: “I don’t mean to seem like I / Care about material things, like our social stats / I just want four walls and / Adobe slats for my girls.” The band members masked their faces to avoid showing themselves to the culture of idolators. If a hundred thousand Americans discovered that they, too, hated the compromised culture, they might not look entirely unlike the Hipster Primitive. Just no longer hip.
Matt Yglesias points out the relational nature of hipsterism:
[W]hat I think is most interesting about the term “hipster” is that it seems to function in a purely relational sense. For any city-dwelling member of my generation, there’s always some other set of people who are the “hipsters” and some other set of people who think you’re one of the hipsters.
Link Train
Open tabs run this town.
- The real elite in America
- Musings on the future of cosmopolitan social democracy
- The economics of Seinfeld
- NPR has a guide to blogging
(photo credit: Clark Kinsey)
Try to live near a subway entrance and other predictions for the future
You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual
You’ve become a notch in the Internet’s belt. Don’t try to delude yourself that you’re a romantic lone individual. To the new order, you’re just a node. There is no escape.
More predictions about the future here.
The Vacuity of the Broadcast Industries
Mark Zuckerberg comments that Hollywood seemed to have trouble understanding that he didn’t want to create Facebook to get a girl, but just because it would be satisfying to create the website. This shuttered view of humanity extends way beyond Silicon Valley, and finds its purest form in cable news. According to the well-worn narrative, it’s almost unimaginable that someone in politics does something, because it’s the right thing to do. Rather, one is always motivated because it helps you somehow in the political horserace, or it’s a mistake and blunder. It’s a rather sad view of the world, where no one does anything unless it directly betters themselves vis-a-vis other people.
Human relationships are important. In fact, they might be the most fulfilling aspect of civilization. But, other things motivate people to do things, even if they are abstract notions we don’t all share.
The Beauty of Sebastião Salgado’s Photographs
Filed under: All Those Other Places, The Culture | Tags: Brazil, Photography
Leave a Comment 
These photographs by Brazilian photographer, Sebastião Salgado, look beautiful. Coming to a museum near you…
Greatest Letter to the Editor Ever
Filed under: The Culture | Tags: Bicycles, Cities, Hipsters, Yuppies
Leave a Comment Letters: Just who do these insulting, childless hipster bike riders think they are?
I JUST READ another article on this bike-lane baloney – and I’ve had it with the politicians in this city afraid to say to these single, no-kid hipsters that bike lanes just don’t fit on our streets.Sorry, Philly just wasn’t designed for them.
These hipsters always want what they want whether it makes sense or not. And the lamebrains who run the city give it to them because they’re afraid to look like they’re not trying to save the planet! (Mayor Nutter is a wannabe yuppie hipster.)
So now they’re going to get more of what they want no matter what the cost to us car-owning planet-destroyers. But the only way the planet is going to be saved is by governments all around the world working in unison to change the whole planet’s carbon footprint – not by some little jerk who has no kids to take to school in the morning and has no other business in Center City other than to go work at the coffee shop or “bike shop,” riding his bike to his destination.
Most of these people don’t live the typical family life, with kids and all the other stuff.
I’m tired of the agendas jammed down our throats by these liberals! I lived in Queen Village from 1994-2006, and I got their number.
I can’t stand what this city has become, but I’m just a dumb Italian, right? Don’t let me get started on how prejudiced they are toward me because I have a South Philly accent!
They think they’re superior, and we’re just Neanderthals who don’t give a rap about this city (or planet).
I’ve got news for them. When I was growing up, we didn’t need trash police to tell us to keep our street clean. And the old Italian ladies would scrub their steps and pavements, and everyone would follow suit. When my wife worked in Center City, they’d make fun of us – now we can’t stop them from moving into our neighborhoods.
Frank Romano, Philadelphia
(Via Atrios)
Who’s Gay Curious?
From OkCupid, the redder, the more bicurious:
The West lives up to it’s Brokeback reputation, and in Canada everyone is bicurious.
