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Category: Culture

Emerson didn’t practice the self-reliance he preached

Emerson didn’t practice the self-reliance he preached

Mark Greif writes: In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence in 1976, a graduate student sent a proposal to an editor at a trade publisher in New York. Would he consider taking on a book about the Minutemen and their “shot heard round the world,” set painstakingly in a history of Concord, Massachusetts, the town where the North Bridge fight broke out? In 1977, that book—which was also the student’s dissertation—won a Bancroft Prize, the highest honor in…

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Primate memory

Primate memory

Tetsuro Matsuzawa writes: The most recent common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans lived between five and seven million years ago. This shared heritage became evident when sequencing revealed a 1.2% DNA difference between species. Chimpanzees have a living sister species, bonobos, that is equally closely related to humans. Both chimpanzees and bonobos are found only in Africa; this is also true of gorillas. Chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor with gorillas between eight and nine million years ago. Another…

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Being Persian before nationalism

Being Persian before nationalism

Mana Kia writes: At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands. As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory…

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What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture?

What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture?

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska writes: The first time I saw Pixar’s movie Inside Out (2015), I was too entranced by its craftsmanship to realise that there was something odd, almost eerie, about its human characters. I was charmed by little Riley, the protagonist, with the chattering critters prancing around in her head. There’s Joy, a feisty version of Tinker Bell with cropped blue hair and indomitable optimism; Anger, a flaming-red stump with eyes like slits and fire bursting from his head; Sadness,…

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Culturally illiterate Americans weren’t equipped to win Afghan hearts and minds

Culturally illiterate Americans weren’t equipped to win Afghan hearts and minds

Baktash Ahadi writes: Like many Afghan Americans, I have spent much of the past few weeks trying to secure safe passage from Afghanistan for family, friends and colleagues, with tragically limited success. I also know that many Americans have been asking: Why is this crazy scramble necessary? How could Afghanistan have collapsed so quickly? As a former combat interpreter who served alongside U.S. and Afghan Special Operations forces, I can tell you part of the answer — one that’s been…

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Great ape interactions indicate that bonobos and chimps follow certain social customs, much like humans

Great ape interactions indicate that bonobos and chimps follow certain social customs, much like humans

Gizmodo reports: You don’t walk up to a coworker without some sort of greeting, and you don’t end conversations simply by turning heel. There are rules to the game of social behavior, and now a research team studying chimpanzees and bonobos say those great apes have social habits that look a lot like what we humans call “hello” and “goodbye.” The research team observed over 2,000 interactions between chimpanzees as well as bonobos, another ape species closely related to humans….

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What misspellings reveal about cultural evolution

What misspellings reveal about cultural evolution

Helena Miton writes: Something about me must remind people of a blind 17th-century poet. My last name, Miton, is French, yet people outside of France invariably misspell it as “Milton”—as in the famed English author, John Milton, of the epic poem Paradise Lost. It is not uncommon for people to misspell an unfamiliar name—yet 99 times out of 100 people misspell mine as “Milton.” That is the name that shows up on everything from my university gym card to emails…

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It is only Utopia that allows us to dream together

It is only Utopia that allows us to dream together

Jeet Heer writes: Utopia and dystopia are twins, born at the same moment from the shared ancestry of social critique. Although remembered as the first modern attempt to systematically imagine an ideal society, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) began with a stark portrait of a Europe torn apart by war and crushing poverty, with the shocking prediction that if the enclosure of farmland continued, soon sheep would be eating people. This horrifying prospect made it urgent to look for an alternative,…

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Africa’s ancient scripts counter European ideas of literacy

Africa’s ancient scripts counter European ideas of literacy

D Vance Smith writes: Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber….

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Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Kate Julian writes: Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home,…

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The miracle of the commons

The miracle of the commons

Michelle Nijhuis writes: In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense,…

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Hollywood’s anti-Black bias costs it $10 billion a year

Hollywood’s anti-Black bias costs it $10 billion a year

Franklin Leonard writes: Days after a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, suffocated George Floyd and the video went viral, I watched my social media feed fill with blackout tiles and corporate publicity statements. They poured in from every industry, proclaiming solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Hollywood — where I have worked for almost two decades — was no exception. Far from offering relief, each new assertion by a talent agency, film studio, television network or streaming service that…

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A critically endangered bird is losing its song

A critically endangered bird is losing its song

Brisbane Times reports: When Michael Alfa was setting up to photograph wildlife at Woolgoolga’s sewage works near the northern NSW town of Coffs Harbour last year, the avid birdwatcher could hardly believe his senses. There, among the warbling wattlebirds hanging off a coastal banksia tree, was a lone, critically endangered regent honeyeater, distinctive in its yellow and black plumage. But not its birdsong. “It was making the exact same song [as the wattlebirds]. If you hadn’t seen it, you wouldn’t…

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti changed American culture forever

Lawrence Ferlinghetti changed American culture forever

Fred Kaplan writes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at the age of 101, was one of the key figures in 20th-century American culture. He was as responsible as any single other person for the rise of the Beats, the end of obscenity laws, and, not least, the transformation of San Francisco from a backwater province to a vibrant artistic center. He did all this through the creation and flourishing of a bookstore, City Lights—which, seven decades after its founding,…

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Reading, that strange and uniquely human thing

Reading, that strange and uniquely human thing

Lydia Wilson writes: The Chinese artist Xu Bing has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Last year I visited the Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, to see a retrospective of his work. One installation, Book from the Sky, featured scrolls of paper looping down from the ceiling and lying along the floor of a large room, printed Chinese characters emerging into view as I moved closer to the reams of paper. But this…

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A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

The New York Times reports: In the top echelons of classical music, the violinist Jennifer Koh is by any measure a star. With a dazzling technique, she has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about — appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Now, nine months into a contagion that has halted most public gatherings and decimated the performing arts, Ms. Koh, who watched a year’s…

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