Category: Culture

Salon of the Cave Bear.

“The implication of these careful cultural signifiers: The caveman has grasped not just literacy and reason but also the affectations of the modern hipster aesthete. (That knowingly antiquated racket might easily have been stolen from a Wes Anderson set.)” Old friend Seth Stevenson ruminates on the proposed Geico caveman TV show for Slate.

If you’re feeling sinister.

By way of Dangerous Meta, a new NBER working paper finds that left-handed men make 13-21% more than their right-handed counterparts (although the same doesn’t apply for women.) “The study is the latest to suggest there’s something special about lefties. Other researchers have found that left-handers are overrepresented on university faculties, as well as among gifted students, artists and musicians.” Update: Slate‘s Joel Waldfogel considers the results.

Bowling alone.

“‘People are increasingly busy,’ said Margaret Gibbs, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. ‘We’ve become a society where we expect things instantly, and don’t spend the time it takes to have real intimacy with another person.’” CNN delves into the broadening landscape of American loneliness, which, according to the NYT, is becoming particularly acute among middle-aged men without college degrees.

That Giant Sucking Sound.

“Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don’t require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks).” In Slate, my friend Seth Stevenson writes in defense of the word “suck.”

Cubism.

“The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. The year was 1968. Nixon won the presidency. The Beatles released The White Album. And home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, a Coloradan who had joined the company as director of research.” (Propst would later deem his invention “monolithic insanity.”) Fortune‘s Julie Schlosser recounts the ignominious rise of the cubicle as the bane of the American workplace. “The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.”

Captain Emo.

“Money is a funny thing with hipsters. They exist in a state of perpetual luxuriant slumming. They drink blue-collar beers but hold white-collar jobs. Or vice versa.” As seen on Slate, two choice essays on the Wes Anderson aesthetic and the cultural baggage of contemporary hipsterism (the former by a college friend of mine, Christian Lorentzen of N+1.) They said that irony was the shackles of youth.

Aigh!! Books!!!

By way of a colleague in the program, conservative rag Human Events lists their choices for the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th & 20th Centuries (because remember, folks — reading & thinking are dangerous.) The usual rogues’ gallery — Marx, Hitler, Mao — are up front, as you might expect, but then things get kooky. Including Darwin is medieval enough, but Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson? You must be joking. (Well, at least it’s good to see the right-wing fringe still running scared from progressives like John Dewey and Herbert Croly.)