Category: The Dish

Josh Jones digs up a piece of pop culture history:

The band themselves had almost nothing to do with the show, other than appearing in an odd promotion. Trading entirely in broad slapstick comedy of the Scooby-Doo variety, the show saw the four mates tumble into one goofy situation after another, some supernatural, some musical, some theatrical. Although all natural performers themselves, no Beatle ever voiced his character on the show. Instead, American actor Paul Frees, as John and George, and British actor Lance Percival, as Paul and Ringo, imitated them, very badly. The Beatles cartoon show aired at a time when the kids TV landscape was just beginning to resemble the one we have today, with ABC competitor CBS running superhero shows like Space Ghost, Superman, and Mighty Mouse, but the surreal plots and musical numbers on The Beatles were an attempt to reach adults as well.

Watch the first episode above, and check out the rest here.

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell reflects on the history of the midi skirt – the miniskirt’s more subdued cousin:

Ironically, feminism became the midi’s worst enemy; liberated women refused to purchase whole new wardrobes just because fashion magazines told them to. In an October 1970 article titled “Fashion Fascism: The Politics of Midi,” the San Francisco counterculture fashion magazine Rags decried the midi as a capitalist “conspiracy”; in addition to being “cumbersome and matronly” it had “built-in obsolescence.” (How this differentiated it from any other fashion trend, the magazine did not specify.) With inflation on the rise, the midi was an economic encumbrance, too; the longer length required a higher price point.

The warring interests of consumers, retailers, and the fashion press culminated in what Newsweek called “the midi-skirt debacle of 1970.” One midwestern shopkeeper complained in a letter to Women’s Wear Daily in mid-August: “You are doing quite a disservice to the manufacturers and retailers by trying to promote a fashion that the customers are not ready for.” Vogue suffered a 38 percent drop in ad revenue in the first three months of 1971; many of its advertisers had been burned by the backlash. Vreeland was unceremoniously demoted to consulting editor in May, but the damage was done: Consumer confidence in fashion magazines—and the fashion industry in general—was replaced by a rebellious cynicism.

Grad student Rotem Ben-Shachar reflects on female attrition in the sciences:

The reason for the “leaky pipeline” is a combination of social, cultural, and psychological factors—but they all contribute to a confidence gap that plagues female scientists, just as acutely as it plagues other professions. A recent survey of 193 graduate students in STEM fields at Duke showed that women consistently underestimate their abilities compared to men. In this study, Psychologist Lindsey Copeland found that 41 percent of men indicated that it is “definitely” true they have good technical skills (defined as the knowledge and abilities needed to accomplish mathematical, engineering, scientific, or computer-related duties), compared to only 11.5 percent of women.

I’ve noticed a similar distinction in the way men and women talk about their work. Men talk about how exciting their projects are; if they’re stuck on a project, they blame it on resources or lack of support from their advisor. Women talk about how they don’t know how to move on, the grant they didn’t get, how their results aren’t interesting. For men, the next step after graduating is obviously a postdoc. Women are already considering alternatives in case academia does not work out.

Jeremy Caradonna questions the value of “progress”:

Advocates of sustainability are not opposed to industrialization per se, and don’t seek a return to the Stone Age. But what they do oppose is the dubious narrative of progress… Along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they acknowledge the objective advancement of technology, but they don’t necessarily think that it has made us more virtuous, and they don’t assume that the key values of the Industrial Revolution are beyond reproach: social inequality for the sake of private wealth; economic growth at the expense of everything, including the integrity of the environment; and the assumption that mechanized newness is always a positive thing. Above all, sustainability-minded thinkers question whether the Industrial Revolution has jeopardized humankind’s ability to live happily and sustainably upon the Earth. Have the fossil-fueled good times put future generations at risk of returning to the same misery that industrialists were in such a rush to leave behind?

But what if we rethink the narrative of progress? What if we believe that the inventions in and after the Industrial Revolution have made some things better and some things worse? What if we adopt a more critical and skeptical attitude toward the values we’ve inherited from the past? Moreover, what if we write environmental factors back in to the story of progress? Suddenly, things begin to seem less rosy. Indeed, in many ways, the ecological crisis of the present day has roots in the Industrial Revolution.

(Photo of a Burning Man sculpture from the Flickr account of BLM Nevada)

Dan Shanoff wonders:

“Glance” is the name of the feature of the Apple Watch that let Watch-wearers skim through a series of not-quite-notifications. Maybe they are notifications, but only as a subset of a new class of ultra-brief news.

“Atomic unit” was a helpful metaphor, but we’re now talking about the proton/neutron level. Glance journalism makes tweets look like longform, typical news notifications (and even innovative atomized news apps) look like endless scroll, and [Zach] Seward’s list of essential Things (chart, gif, quote, stat) look unresponsive.