Tag: culture

Monocle

The Social Index

from IRL to IVL and everything in between

Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways. I decided to try to index these new entities—to draft a sort of Social Media Bestiary

The city as idea incubator

New York excels at creating those eclectic networks. Subcultures and small businesses generate ideas and skills that inevitably diffuse through society, influencing other groups. As the sociologist Claude Fischer put it in an influential essay on subcultures published in 1975, “The larger the town, the more likely it is to contain, in meaningful numbers and unity, drug addicts, radicals, intellectuals, ‘swingers’, health-food faddists, or whatever; and the more likely they are to influence (as well as offend) the conventional center of the society.”

Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy

epic rant about how advances in technology are taken for granted almost immediately

Kindle Book Lending

a tiny step towards more interesting ebook scenarios.

One could envision centuries old ebooks with talmudic collections of notes–with the price of the book rising with to the quality of previous owners.

Comics with problems

Meet GABBY THE ANTI-PEDOPHILE PUPPET! She knows when you are sleeping and she knows when you’re awake. Here’s a great pamphlet on avoiding molestation and abduction in local bathrooms, gas stations and from ice cream vendors. It’s Gabby the Puppet in THE RIDDLE OF THE FRIENDLY STRANGER. A 1960s giveaway from Marathon Oil Company.

Garbled German

engrish comes to german. in homeopathic doses, one imagines.

Living out of a hard drive

that article is totally linkbait for me: replacing physical stuff with digital things, and singularity talk. me like!

Many have begun trading in CD, DVD, and book collections for digital music, movies, and e-books. But this trend in digital technology is now influencing some to get rid of nearly all of their physical possessions – from photographs to furniture to homes altogether.

Jousting

The New York Times Magazine visits the Gulf Coast International Jousting Championiships, a new old extreme sport spun-out of Ren Faires. “This is the real deal. There’s a real possibility of getting hurt.” A member of the Chukchansi tribe in California, with tattoos of his spirit animals ringing his thick biceps. He doesn’t joust because he’s attracted to romantic notions of honor and chivalry or because he has an affinity for the medieval period. (“I don’t know jack about history, nor do I care”.) He does it because he considers jousting one of the most extreme sports ever invented, and he likes doing things that most other people can’t or won’t do.

McMansion Downsizing

after the cameras have gone, homeowners struggle to keep up with their expensive new digs. Bigger, more lavish homes have come with bigger, more lavish utility bills. And bigger tax assessments.