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Thursday morning, I happened to be rereading Pauline Kael’s classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” A few hours later, I learned that David Lynch had died, and a sentence from the piece immediately came back to me: “The world doesn’t work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be.” I felt Lynch’s critical spirit in Kael’s remark. Lynch, more than any filmmaker of his time, faced down carefully argued lies and reckoned with the burden of alienated identities. Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem made to exemplify these terms. He sees what’s kept invisible and reveals what’s kept scrupulously hidden, and his visions shatter veneers of respectability to depict, in fantasy form, unbearable realities.
With “Blue Velvet,” from 1986, Lynch instantly became the exemplary filmmaker of the Reagan era, blasting through its ambient hypocrisy and sanctimony with methods that went past observational reporting. In a drama about the criminal underside of a small town, he brings out nefarious schemes involving officials who lead double lives. The machinations are less like coherent conspiracies than like the mysterious reverberations of dreams—violent, predatory dreams that seem like the underside of the virtuous myths that Americans eagerly bought from their Hollywood President. For all its sharp-eyed precision, the film feels flung onto the screen in the heat of artistic and diagnostic urgency. Lynch’s work, with its audacious invention and exquisite realization of symbolic details and uncanny realms, is reminiscent of the cinema’s other great Surrealist, Luis Buñuel, but, with its specifically American and local perspective, it also brings to mind a cinematic updating of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
There are times when, deep into a scroll through my phone, I tilt my head and realize that I’m not even sure what app I’m on. A video takes up my entire screen. If I slide my finger down, another appears. The feeling is disorienting, so I search for small design cues at the margins of my screen. The thing I’m staring at could be TikTok, or it could be one of any number of other social apps that look exactly like it.
Although it was not the first app to offer an endless feed, and it was certainly not the first to use algorithms to better understand and target its users, TikTok put these ingredients together like nothing else before it. It amassed what every app wants: many users who spend hours and hours scrolling, scrolling, scrolling (ideally past ads and products that they’ll buy). Every other major social platform—Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, even LinkedIn—has copied TikTok’s format in recent years. The app might get banned in the United States, but we’ll still be living in TikTok’s world.
I recently made a game out of counting how many swipes it takes for each of my apps to try to funnel me into a bottomless video feed. From the default screen on the YouTube app, I swiped only once, past a long (five-minute) video, before it showed me a split screen of four “Shorts,” the first of which tried baiting me with a few seconds of looping, silent footage. Tapping any would have led me down the app’s vertical-video pipeline. I’m confronted with an array of “Reels” almost immediately upon opening Facebook, and need to swipe only once or twice before hitting similar “Videos for you” on LinkedIn. Both of these apps also have dedicated video tabs; Snapchat and Instagram do too. X eschews the carousel, but clicking any video leads to the entry point of something common to all these platforms: the wormhole. The app expands into full-screen mode to serve me an infinite scroll of videos.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
Open Socrates By Agnes Callard Review – A Design For Life
I beseech you,” wrote Oliver Cromwell, in his letter to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, “in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” Cromwell’s pungent entreaty is often cited in conversations about the importance of self‑enquiry and the perils of overconfidence. It’s an odd but telling choice, given that he was asking others to question their assumptions, while leaving his own unexamined. He had just purged parliament, overseen the execution of Charles I, and was in Scotland leading an army in a pre-emptive strike. Naturally, he wanted the Scottish forces massing for battle to think again. The obvious retort is: “No. You.”
This is one of several thorny problems philosopher Agnes Callard tackles in Open Socrates, an exploration of Socrates’ “substantive ethics of enquiry”; an approach to knowledge that, she argues, can’t merely be tossed into our usual repertoire of rhetorical flourishes, but rather detonates the bedrock on which we claim to stand: “People will announce, ‘Question everything!’ without noticing they have just uttered not a question, but a command.” The Socratic method is an approach with “colossal ambitions” and not just some antiquated curio we might repurpose to get an edge in business meetings. In fact, its power is so great that we must wield it with great care.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
If your goal is to be happier in the year ahead, you might focus on your body rather than your mind. You can start right now by sitting up a little straighter. Then give a brief smile—even a fake one. These tweaks will tell your brain that something good is about to happen and you’re more likely to feel positive and upbeat.
Sound unlikely? In research led by cognitive scientist John Bargh at Yale in 2009, people who held a cup of warm cup coffee before an interview were more likely to find an individual warm and kind. A 2010 study led by psychologist Joshua Ackerman, showed that people make different decisions when they’re seated in a hard chair versus a soft one. Soft seat, soft heart, you might say. When asked to negotiate to buy a new car, those in the hard chairs offered dramatically less than the others after one offer was rejected. Hard chairs made people harder negotiators.
We think of our brains as mystical and all-controlling, but they are also a 3-pound mass, sitting in a dark skull, completely reliant on the information that comes from our bodies and senses to make any decisions. Research into embodied cognition shows that what we touch, see, or otherwise experience with our senses affects our mindset and attitude. If you’ve ever shaken hands with a new acquaintance only to encounter a sweaty palm, you understand. Similarly, you can meet your perfect algorithmic match on a dating website, but if the person smells wrong on a first date, it’s all over.
Happiness isn’t exclusively a conscious decision. Very often our bodies send signals about how we feel and our conscious brains are simply responding rather than controlling. Feeling happier may start with going outside since research shows that being around water—including lakes, streams and ponds—improves well-being more dramatically than almost anything else. Mathew White, an environmental psychologist, has found that being near water versus being on a city street is about the same difference in happiness as doing household chores versus going out socializing with friends.
Its employees are some of its most devoted congregants. “It is the best of the old internet, and it’s the best of old San Francisco, and neither one of those things really exist in large measures anymore,” says the Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, another longtime staffer, who loves cycling and favors black nail polish. “It’s a window into the late-’90s web ethos and late-’90s San Francisco culture—the crunchy side, before it got all tech bro. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic.”
Read the rest of this article at: Time
In the 1990s, an entire generation was robbed of its historical consciousness by a powerful and seemingly unprecedented tale. This story, crafted as the Cold War came to an end, declared that real or imagined boundaries had stopped working as they once had. Humans were no longer contained within their old geographies or identities. They now inhabited a new world that appeared to be unhinged from the normal evolution of human society.
The concept chosen to capture this transformational moment in human history was ‘globalisation’. It described how new technologies and networks of connectivity had suddenly brought human communities closer together and made them permeable to an uncontrollable flow of people, ideas, goods and cultural practices, which all moved freely across the integrated markets of the world economy. In the wake of this transformation, new jargon emerged, expressing new anxieties: the world had truly become the ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s, but it was a world shaped by multinational corporations and ‘elite globalisers’, who spoke a common, hegemonic ‘global English’, and were spearheading a destructive ‘homogenisation’ (or ‘McDonaldisation’) of human cultures that national borders were too fragile to withstand.
During the past three decades, more people have begun viewing our ‘global’ world as a cursed fate. With its suffocating time-space compression, globalisation seems to have uncoupled us from the logic and flow of history. Our suspicious, bastard identities – patched together from a mishmash of cultures – appear incompatible with our ancestors’ ‘authentic’ traditions and ways of life. We have become strangers to the places they called home, to the ways they dressed, ate or communicated with one another. And, with no template for how to live and no experience to learn from, the deafening siren songs of anti-globalisation movements are now luring us back into the safer identities and boundaries of a lost, golden past.
This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times. And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown.
But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world.
Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past. Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale, which begins much, much earlier – long before the arrival of international supply chains, ocean-going sailing ships, and continent-spanning silk roads. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong?
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
