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jmfinizio

Transparent screens are the cool new tech trend - CNN - 0 views

  • you can also see right through them.
  • LG (LPL) unveiled a transparent TV with a screen you can see through when on or off.
  • While 8k TVs may be the next true big bump in screen resolution, many TV manufacturers use CES as a testing ground to tease new innovations.
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  • In August, Xiaomi started selling a 55-inch transparent TV with a mighty high $7,200 price tag.
  • Although transparent TVs seem like a cool-but-unnecessary technology, industry experts say they are something we could see more in public spaces soon.
  • "The major use case is going to be commercial for now,"
  • It's not unusual for companies to release technologies without a clear market for them
  • . Doing so is a way to gauge people's initial response and interest
  • LG's move to hide a transparent TV in a bed for its promotional video shows how the technology could find a home beyond public places
  • it can be placed like a space divider or against a large glass window, which will only look like glass when it is not in us
Javier E

Are the New 'Golden Age' TV Shows the New Novels? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • it’s become common to hear variations on the idea that quality cable TV shows are the new novels.
  • Thomas Doherty, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, called the new genre “Arc TV” — because its stories follow long, complex arcs of development — and insisted that “at its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel.”
  • Mixed feelings about literature — the desire to annex its virtues while simultaneously belittling them — are typical of our culture today, which doesn’t know quite how to deal with an art form, like the novel, that is both democratic and demanding.
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  • comparing even the best TV shows with Dickens, or Henry James, also suggests how much the novel can achieve that TV doesn’t even attempt.
  • Televised evil, for instance, almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists. But this has nothing to do with the way we encounter evil in real life, which is why a character like Gilbert Osmond, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is more chilling in his bullying egotism than Tony Soprano
  • Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable. But it is voice, tone, the sense of the author’s mind at work, that are the essence of literature, and they exist in language, not in images.
  • At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.
  • Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.
  • television and the novel travel in opposite directions.
katrinaskibicki

TV is killing off so many characters that death is losing its punch - Vox - 0 views

  • TV is drowning in cheap, sloppily executed deaths
  • The spring of 2016 has been marked by death after death after death on TV. Some have proved controversial. Some have passed without commentary. A couple have been largely applauded.
  • But the fact remains: TV is killing major characters at an astonishing rate.
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  • That's the allure of a TV death in a nutshell. It's why everybody in the industry keeps chasing it. It raises the show's dramatic stakes. It almost automatically creates lots of conversation. And when done well, it can take your show to another level.
  • The problem with most TV deaths is pretty simple: They're frequently devoid of meaning, inserted into the plot only to create shock and boost a show's profile on Twitter.
  • Since it's hard to simply force audiences to care about the deaths of extreme supporting characters, both The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones have increasingly turned toward sensationalizing the deaths that do occur, making them bigger and bloodier, with mixed results.
  • The problem only compounds itself if you survey television as a whole. In isolation, a death that is adequate, though not particularly stirring, becomes harder to take when there's a whole wave of mediocre deaths around the programming grid. It gives off the appearance of a medium that's turning, increasingly, toward desperation.
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
sissij

Will 'Skam,' a Norwegian Hit, Translate? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • OSLO — “Skam,” a racy, emotionally intense, true-to-life Norwegian web and television series, follows a group of Oslo teenagers as they navigate sex, school, drinking, depression, rape, religion, coming out and the pains of status anxiety, in real life and online.
  • Each season of “Skam” centers on one character. Season 3, which wraps up next week, has focused on Isak (Tarjei Sandvik Moe), who is coming to terms with being gay and has fallen for an older boy, Even (Henrik Holm).
  • “‘Skam’ is combining reality and fiction and the line between them isn’t so clear,” said Mari Magnus, 27, the web producer for the show, who writes the text messages and masterminds the Instagram accounts.
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    I strongly recommend this TV series because it has a very good depiction of the coming of age problems. I really like the way that the TV series switches the main character for every season. The main characters are all in the same story frame but with different identities. I really like this variety of perspectives in the TV series. Something related to TOK is that nobody is the center of the world, or rather there are a lot of different version of the world, so that why when we are referring to the same even we all experience, we may have completely different description. --Sissi (12/9/2016)
Javier E

'I Like to Watch,' by Emily Nussbaum book review - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Nussbaum’s case: That television could be great, and not because it was “novelistic” or “cinematic” but because it was, simply, television, “episodic, collaborative, writer-driven, and formulaic” by design.
  • According to Nussbaum, a TV show achieved greatness not despite these facts (which assumes they are limitations) but because of them (which sees them as an infrastructure that provokes creativity and beauty — “the sort that govern sonnets,”
  • Nussbaum’s once-iconoclastic views have become mainstream.
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  • It is increasingly common to find yourself apologizing not for watching too much TV but for having failed to spend 70 hours of your precious, finite life binge-watching one of the Golden Age of Television’s finest offerings.
  • Nussbaum writes of her male classmates at NYU, where she was a literature doctoral student in the late 1990s. These men worshiped literature and film; they thought TV was trash. These men “were also, not coincidentally, the ones whose opinions tended to dominate mainstream media conversation.”
  • the same forces that marginalize the already-marginalized still work to keep TV shows by and about women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals on a lower tier than those about cis, straight, white men: Your Tony Sopranos, your Walter Whites, your Don Drapers, your True Detectives
  • Over and over, Nussbaum pushes back against a hierarchy that rewards dramas centered on men and hyperbolically masculine pursuits (dealing drugs, being a cop, committing murders, having sex with beautiful women) and shoves comedies and whatever scans as “female” to the side.
  • Nussbaum sticks up for soaps, rom-coms, romance novels and reality television, “the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun.
  • Nussbaum’s writing consistently comes back to the question of “whose stories carried weight . . . what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and who . . . deserved attention . . . Whose story counted as universal?
  • What does it mean to think morally about the art we consume — and, by extension, financially support, and center in our emotional and imaginative lives? The art that informs, on some near-cellular level, who we want to know and love and be?
  • maybe the next frontier of cultural thought is in thinking more cohesively about what we’ve long compartmentalized — of not stashing conflicting feelings about good art by bad men in some dark corner of our minds, but in holding our discomfort and contradictions up to the light, for a clearer view.
peterconnelly

Opinion: How streaming can avoid the same fate as cable TV - CNN - 0 views

  • Streaming networks were the center of attention last month when the television industry — or, more accurately now, the entertainment industry — staged its annual ritual known as the "upfronts."
  • The program distributors (what used to be called studios) are trying to navigate a marketplace that is not entirely sure where it's going. Streaming was expected to take over as the be-all/end-all of not just TV, but also the film industry. But the sudden crash for Netflix, the industry leader, in both subscribers and stock price, has the business collectively hitting the pause button. After all, who knows whether an overall better idea than streaming is only a few years away?
  • on. After
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  • hugely successful media giants dominating the entertainment scene, growing fat and cocky, dismissive of upstart competitors, followed by a humbling slide toward marginalization, if not outright irrelevance.
  • First radio was so dominant that surely no one thought television could ever replace it. Then broadcast TV was such an enormous presence in American life, some network executives dismissed cable TV as destined to be small-timey forever.
  • A viewer could watch a whole series in a single day and never be bothered by somebody selling corn flakes.
  • There could be a number of reasons for the huge subscriber drop, but the biggest seems to be increased competition, with a slew of companies with great resources and deep libraries of content entering the streaming world in recent years, including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of CNN).
  • Netflix, following in the footsteps of streaming competitors like Hulu and HBO Max, is reportedly exploring a new option for financial security. Or rather an old one, a really old one.
  • The one that brought all those people together in Manhattan for the upfronts: ad dollars.
jlessner

Super Bowl Ads: Incredibly Cheap or an Incredible Waste of Money? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • or the second straight year, advertisers are willing to pay about $4 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, and for the umpteenth straight year, there are questions about whether Sunday represents a sensational steal or an insane rip-off.
  • Compared to another primetime TV commercial, there's no question: Super Bowl ads are cheap.
  • But compared to, say, any other sensible way of spending money, many Super Bowl ads are something like a ritual financial sacrifice, a pyre of money set on fire to please the Buzz Gods for no particular reason.
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  • Super Bowl's audience exists on a different planet from the rest of everything we call "pop culture."
  • So if you add the year's biggest movie and the year's biggest TV show and the year's biggest album (while pretending that there is no overlap), you sum to an audience of 69 million, total. This year's Super Bowl is projected to have 120 million viewers watching—all at once. There is pop culture, and then there is the Super Bowl.
  • To understand why the Super Bowl is such a good deal by TV advertising standards, you have to understand the first thing about TV advertising. It's not about the price you pay for the advertisement. It's about the price you pay for the eyeballs
  • The argument "$4 million for 30 seconds is absurd" is sort of like saying "$1,000 for dinner is absurd." Yes, $1,000 is an expensive dinner-for-one. But what about a fancy dinner for 10 friends? Or 20 friends? Or 100? The more people at the table, the more that $1,000 starts to look like a bargain.
  • The Super Bowl's rate this year is about $35 to reach 1,000 people. Is that expensive? Not at all.
  • People in living rooms across the country say, in unison, "Everybody shut up, I want to experience this corporate messaging so that I can engage with the brand."
  • For four hours a year, a Super Bowl viewer transforms from an ordinary human, constantly rejecting the bombardment of advertising, into a marketing professor's platonic ideal of consumer, diligently seeking out great brand messaging. Surely, that remarkable metamorphosis is worth something.
runlai_jiang

You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
summertyler

TV VIEW - When Reality Begins to Look a Little Unreal - 0 views

  • When Reality Begins to Look a Little Unreal
  • Television's reality formats include everything from the nightly news to talk shows to ''based on fact'' movies to the Summer Olympics to Phil, Oprah and Geraldo. The only productions definitely not admitted under the reality umbrella are sitcoms and action-adventures.
  • Fox Broadcasting, already happy about its ''America's Most Wanted,'' a package that adds up to an excuse for the detailed re-creation of violent crimes, is now pushing ''Beyond Tomorrow,'' a magazine about technology developments. The premiere featured a reporter in a sushi restaurant in Japan ''accidentally'' spilling sauce on his $35 polo shirt, which was then cleaned to spotless perfection by high-frequency sound waves.
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  • How much of this kind of reality can the public take? Producers clearly see no end in sight, and the results are increasingly becoming more questionable.
  • This is what's called a ''reality-based'' series, a label that has less to do with reality than comforting formula. The cameras do not go to a real hospital. But three real doctors are on the production staff.
  • ''What you are about to see is real,'' we were told once again.
  • His life shattered, he now has the dubious pleasure of knowing that, for some 20 minutes, he was the star of a television reality entertainment.
  • ''On Trial'' opens with an announcer exclaiming that viewers are about to see ''Real people! Real Cases! Real Life!'' Mr. Clooney, a distinguished-looking fellow, fills in the pertinent facts.
  • Everything is designed, they say, to ''give the show its docudrama look.'' The show's regular staff of three doctors are depicted by actors.
  • Needless to say, medical problems and crises have long been popular on television, especially on soap operas. ''Family Medical Center'' merely dispenses with extraneous plot and character developments and goes right to the medical core. A press release is candid about the show's interpretation of reality: ''It will have suspense, conflict and a resolution, which in almost all cases will be a happy one.''
  • The show looks as real as television entertainment can possibly make it. Alert viewers, however, will note whizzing by in the final credits the following advisory: '' 'Family Medical Center' is a dramatization. The characters are fictional and bear no resemblance to persons living or dead.''
  • Television reality wears many masks. A key to the overall picture was provided by one of those actors who deceived Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera with false impersonations on air. Why not, he shrugged, it's all entertainment. Frightening but not beyond comprehension.
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    How can you know if a show that is called reality, is actually reality, or if it is just "reality"?
Javier E

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 - it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World | Med... - 2 views

  • But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected – and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded – that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other “junk TV” be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import.
  • This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
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  • Today, the average weekly screen time for an American adult – brace yourself; this is not a typo – is 74 hours (and still going up)
  • The soundbite has been replaced by virality, meme, hot take, tweet. Can serious national issues really be explored in any coherent, meaningful way in such a fragmented, attention-challenged environment?
  • how engaged can any populace be when the most we’re asked to do is to like or not like a particular post, or “sign” an online petition?
  • How seriously should anyone take us, or should we take ourselves, when the “optics” of an address or campaign speech – raucousness, maybe actual violence, childishly attention-craving gestures or facial expressions – rather than the content of the speech determines how much “airtime” it gets, and how often people watch, share and favorite it?
  • Our public discourse has become so trivialized, it’s astounding that we still cling to the word “debates” for what our presidential candidates do onstage when facing each other.
  • Who can be shocked by the rise of a reality TV star, a man given to loud, inflammatory statements, many of which are spectacularly untrue but virtually all of which make for what used to be called “good television”?
  • Who can be appalled when the coin of the realm in public discourse is not experience, thoughtfulness or diplomacy but the ability to amuse – no matter how maddening or revolting the amusement?
  • “Television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium,” my father wrote. “Its grammar, so to say, permits no access to the past … history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.”
  • Later in that passage, Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, is cited for remarking in his 1980 acceptance speech that that era was notable for “a refusal to remember”; my father notes Miłosz referencing “the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place”.
  • “An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,” my father wrote. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”
  • I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did no
  • First: treat false allegations as an opportunity. Seek information as close to the source as possible.
  • Second: don’t expect “the media” to do this job for you. Some of its practitioners do, brilliantly and at times heroically. But most of the media exists to sell you things.
  • Finally, and most importantly, it should be the responsibility of schools to make children aware of our information environments, which in many instances have become our entertainment environments
  • We must teach our children, from a very young age, to be skeptics, to listen carefully, to assume everyone is lying about everything. (Well, maybe not everyone.)
  • “what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility … giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.”
  • we need more than just hope for a way out. We need a strategy, or at least some tactics.
mshilling1

Analysis: TV news is realigning, with Fox's ratings sagging and CNN's soaring - CNN - 0 views

  • Furthermore, a big chunk of Fox's base audience was demoralized by Trump's loss in November and disheartened by the pro-Trump riot last week. Fox's average viewership levels are about 20% lower than they were before the election, even though overall TV news viewership is elevated due to the current combination of crises.
  • Fox sources say that some viewers have sampled Newsmax, yes, but many have just chosen to turn off the news altogether. They're watching Hallmark, HGTV or Netflix instead.
  • "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'
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  • But for the conservative media ecosystem, just what should be affirmed has suddenly become an existential question."
  • Confusion is certainly apparent among many conservative media producers and commentators -- trying to find their footing as the story of the Capitol assault, and the President's reaction, keeps getting worse."
  • Fox is focusing on what it calls "Big Tech censorship" instead, but I strongly suspect that most people want news about the terror threat right now, not Twitter. Frankly, many Fox shows are running away from the news rather than reporting on it.
  • Second: Fox's decision to de-emphasize the news division "in favor of more opinion programming." Third: The opinion shows going "all-in on conspiracies.
Javier E

Opinion | Richard Powers on What We Can Learn From Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say a prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering. That prayer itself comes from the four immeasurables in the Buddhist tradition.
  • When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.
  • Look, I’m 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don’t have emotions because they don’t have an internal life. They don’t have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.
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  • I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.
  • to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?
  • when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.
  • richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.
  • if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.
  • richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.
  • I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.
  • And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.
  • And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.
  • it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.
  • And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.
  • ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this
  • And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
  • let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.
  • it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.
  • the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.
  • Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change
  • And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.
  • I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.
  • The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
  • I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.
  • And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.
  • I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.
  • for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.
  • And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.
  • And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
  • And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.
  • the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.
  • she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.
  • so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.
  • there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.
  • I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.
  • Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think
  • one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.
  • richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.
  • And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are
  • in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference
  • ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,
  • Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”
  • ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.
  • the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you
  • it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.
  • richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.
  • Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.
  • If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.
  • my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.
  • Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous
  • My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.
  • it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.
  • the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.
  • I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?
  • You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.
  • richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.
  • The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
  • richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.
  • I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
  • So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?
  • richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.
  • Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.
  • one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.
  • they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger
  • For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?
Javier E

Opinion | I Did Not Feel the Need to See People Like Me on TV or in Books - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • It reminds me of how many people complain that they don’t see themselves in movies, books, etc. When I was growing up, I didn’t much, either, but I can’t say that it bothered me.
  • But what I enjoyed about TV was seeing something other than myself. I liked it as a window on the world, not as a look into my own life.
  • It was the same with books. The last thing I expected when growing up was to read about myself
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  • There were plenty of books about Black people, but they tended to be about poor or working-class Black people and often depicted Black lives proscribed by discrimination and inequality
  • I was aware of two instances of myself in fiction of the time. One was the nerdy teenage middle-class Black girl in Louise Fitzhugh’s “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change.” Then there was “Sarah Phillips” by Andrea Lee in 1984. That one was a near-sacred experience for me, in depicting a middle-class Black girl who grew up outside Philadelphia, went to Harvard and then moved to Europe. Here was someone I could have been, a variation on some people I knew
  • But I neither needed nor sought out more such books. How much me did I need? I read to learn about what I didn’t know.
  • when I started my graduate study, I explicitly did not want to study Black English. It was too close to home.
  • What fascinated me, and still does, are languages utterly unlike the one I grew up with. This is what I do my academic work on. I am happy to write about Black English, but I do it out of civic duty. What first hooked me on languages was hearing someone speak Hebrew
  • This idea that one, if brown, is to seek one’s self in what one reads and watches gets around quite a bit.
  • But still, the idea that Black people are deprived in not exploring what they already relate to is not as natural as it sounds.
  • This position is rooted, one suspects, as a defense against racism, in a sense that learning most meaningfully takes place within a warm comfort zone of cultural membership. But it’s a wide, wide world out there, and this position ultimately limits the mind and the soul.
  • I question its necessity in 2023. The etymology of the word “education” is related to the Latin “educere,” meaning to lead outward, not inward.
  • It can be especially ticklish to hear white people taking up the idea that Black people stray from their selves when taking up things beyond Blackness
  • I sense the idea that real Blackness means ever seeking yourself in your reading and viewing is a post-1966 thing, to refer to what I wrote here last week.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois had no such idea. He wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
  • Du Bois adapted these “white” works to his own needs and predilections. Even the naked racism he lived with daily did not lead him to draw a line around “white” things as something alien to his essence
  • Rather, he insisted that these works were, in fact, part of his self, regardless of how wider society saw that self or how figures like Shakespeare and Aristotle would have seen him.
  • Du Bois, in this, was normal. Today I sit with “Succession,” Steely Dan and Saul Bellow, and they wince not. I see myself in none of them. Yes, Bellow had some nasty moments on race, such as a gruesomely prurient scene in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” But I’m sorry: I cannot let that one scene — or even two — deprive me of the symphonic reaches of “Herzog” and “Humboldt’s Gift.” What they offer, after all, becomes part of me along with everything else.
  • the truth is that characters I can see as me are now not uncommon on television in particular. Andre Braugher’s Captain Holt on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was about as close to me as I expect a sitcom character ever to be, for example. That was fun. But honestly, I didn’t need it. I live with me. I watch TV to see somebody else.
Javier E

In 2022, TV Woke Up From the American Dream - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In politics, “the American dream” has long been used aspirationally, to evoke family and home. But as my colleague Jazmine Ulloa detailed earlier this year, the phrase has also lately been used ominously, especially by conservative politicians, to describe a certain way of life in danger of being stolen by outsiders.
  • The typical counterargument, both in politics and pop culture, has been that immigrants pursuing their ambitions help to strengthen all of America
  • recent stories have complicated this idea by questioning whether the dream itself — or, at least, defining that dream in mostly material terms — can be toxic.
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  • This is the danger of the American dream when you scale it down from the national to the individual level. You risk devoting your life to wanting something because it’s what you’ve been told you should want. Everybody loves a Cinderella story, but sometimes your dream, in reality, is just a wish somebody else’s heart made.
Javier E

Can Just Anyone Claim to Be a TV Meteorologist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Does an individual have the right to professionally define who she is, or is that designation dictated by other people? Is there an ethical responsibility to describe oneself in a standardized, universally accepted context?
  • Most titles are self-applied. This is generally fine, because most titles are meaningless. If you declare yourself a futurist or a farmer or a musician (or an ethicist), that’s what you are, even if reasonable people can disagree. Most titles indicate only intent (“I call myself a ____ because that is what I aspire to do”). Failure to fulfill that intent has no significant impact on other people; as such, ethics aren’t really in play
  • But this is not the case for those rarefied professions in which strangers rely on someone they’ve never met to possess essential, functional, nonnegotiable knowledge that no normal person could attain without intense schooling or specialized experience. I would place neurosurgeon near the top of this tier.
Javier E

Hollywood Seeks to Slow Cultural Shift to TV - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.
  • the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.
  • After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”
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  • The weakness in movies has multiple roots. Films, while in theaters, live behind a pay wall; television is free, once the monthly subscription is paid.
  • a collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay
  • But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002,
  • “So, what does that mean for us as a culture?” Ms. Sylte asked of a vacuum that might occur if the better films went away. The hole, Mr. Gazzale said, to whom the question was relayed, would be a large one. “Movies remind us of our common heartbeat,” he said.
sissij

Common Science Myths That Most People Believe | IFLScience - 0 views

  • We only use 10% of our brains.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by TeadsADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads It's true that there’s a great deal we don’t know about the brain, but we certainly do know that we use our entire brain.
  • Sugar makes children hyperactive. Attending any child’s birthday party where cake, ice cream, and sugary drinks about would make just about anyone a believer that sugar influences hyperactivity. There has not been much evidence to suggest that the so-called “sugar buzz” is actually real for children (aside from a small subset with an insulin disorder coupled with certain psychiatric disorders).
  • Antibiotics kill viruses.  This one pops up every cold and flu season. Antibiotics, by their very definition, kill bacteria.
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    This article really surprise me that some of my intuitions are wrong. I always thought that if we swallow the gum, then the gum will stick in our stomach and never go away. However, it will pass along as waste. This shows that for many people, some fields of science they learned about are usually second-handed. Many "scientific knowledge" we have are not first handed and they have been modified. Before we are using them as scientific knowledge, we need first to make sure that they are really science, not another myth. --Sissi (1/10/2017)
maxwellokolo

TV host Steve Harvey explains his meeting with Donald Trump - 0 views

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    I thought this article very interesting because I would not expect the comedian, Steve Harvey to sit down and have a talk with Trump and get some positives out of it.
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