Category: The Dish

MessyNessy profiles the GIF artist Oamul, particularly praising his On the Road series:

Oamul is a talented young illustrator and animator from China who brings his hand-drawn illustrations to life in these enchanting GIFs. His subject matter ranges from things he sees, hears and experiences on his travels and in his daily life to his favourite movie scenes….

In an interview last year, Oamul talked about how he became an illustrator:

When did you first discover you liked illustration? What were your influences?

When I was a kid, I saw my sister had drawn a picture about Sailor Moon. At that time, I wanted to draw things that I enjoyed and liked, so I began to use a pen to sketch everyday.

How was your design education? Were you formally educated in design, or was it just a hobby?

After my parents discovered I was gifted at drawing, they decided to send me to formally learn art. When I went to university though, I chose Interior Design. Although interior design is very different from what I create now, it still has a big influence in my work. After I graduated, I learnt 3D animation in a computer game company. Those experiences were crucial in influencing my work today.

What do you think of Design and illustration in China? Do you think it has its own style, or do you think that it is still influenced by the West?

I think today, China’s illustration is becoming more and more diverse, all designers having their own style. But we are still learning all the time from many influences all over the world.

See more of his work here.

Recently, Jordan Ellenberg noticed that, judging by the most-frequently-highlighted passages in Kindle bestsellers, the overwhelming majority of people who buy Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century don’t make it far past the first pages. As William Falk observes, “the Kindle formula also works with fiction”:

Ellenberg’s dullness detector uncovered a curious phenomenon among readers of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year. The five most popular highlights all occur in thelast 20 pages of the 771-page novel. Is that a compliment? I suspect not. The Goldfinch is one of those self-conscious “masterpieces” that some readers and critics adore — and some, like me, find bloated and self-indulgent. To get to the end, I found myself skimming over dense chunks of pointless description and meandering subplots. … I think Tartt’s novel would benefit if it were cut by, say, 250 pages. Kindle doesn’t lie: To be read more, write less.

Meanwhile, Tom Lamont advocates abandoning boring books early on:

[O]f course you should stop reading when the fireworks aren’t there. When you aren’t impressed, lulled, entertained, lightened, depressed, remoulded, whatever you go to books for. Even if it means reshelving the thing with that telltale halt in the creases on the spine, or admitting to friends, spouses or book clubs that you’ve bunked a recommendation.

Alex Clark differs:

Believe me, I am not defending every book that gets published, nor telling people to force themselves onwards when something is clearly a) dross or b) so completely antithetical to everything they as a reader hold dear that only misery awaits. That would be ludicrous, masochistic and likely to result in a more total disenchantment with reading. … But I am saying that if you give up on a book the minute you don’t like a character, twig a plot development, see quite where the author’s going with it all, have a sudden yen for a game of Candy Crush – then you’re going to miss out. I’ve nothing against reads that are quick and dirty fun, but seriously good books are immersive experiences, demanding of time and patience. Respect them.

Previous Dish on Piketty here, and previous Dish on The Goldfinch here.

Virginia Hughes explores why autism studies have exploded in the 21st century. Considering that many more males than females are diagnosed with the disorder, she explores how gender factors into funding:

In 2009, the National Institutes of Health spent $196 million on autism, compared with $186 million on Parkinson’s disease and $22 million on Down syndrome. In her new paper, [science historian Sarah] Richardson takes a close look at hundreds of grant applications and published studies related to autism and sex differences. Many grant applications cite autism’s rising prevalence as prime motivation. But they also frequently site the sex bias and [psychologist Simon] Baron-Cohen’s theory [that autism’s “primary characteristics are just an exaggeration of typical differences between men and women, and that they’re caused by excessive exposure to male sex hormones in the womb”].

Richardson describes grant proposals investigating autism’s sex bias through the lens of genetics, epigenetics, gene-hormone interactions, brain anatomy, chemical exposures, rat brain cells, and even the nervous system of worms.

She also found 442 studies related to autism and sex differences that have been published since 1980. Of these, 86 percent came out after 2001, and 10 percent were authored by Baron-Cohen. The rest came from laboratories in a variety of fields, including endocrinology, genetics, brain imaging, and molecular biology. Since 2001, animal research on this topic has exploded.

This is all evidence, Richardson says, that autism has become a “biomedical platform” for scientists of all stripes who are looking for funding, particularly in this era of shrinking science budgets. “We show how, over time, researchers have begun to link their very basic research — even if it’s on nematodes — to frame it as a contribution to autism,” she says. “In the funding and publication structure, there’s been a real shift toward opportunistically using extreme-male-brain-type theories to gain research funding.”

Previous Dish on autism here, here, here, and here.

 

So argues James Wolcott in an essay exploring the recent 90s nostalgia craze:

Nostalgia isn’t the worst narcotic, but it used to feed a different vein. It was both generational and individual, a distillation of personal experience as unrecoverable as blushing youth. When F. Scott Fitzgerald, the dewiest prose lyricist of the Jazz Age, peered back at the reckless abandon and champagne fizz of the 20s through the clouded curtains of the Depression-era 30s, he elegized himself, Zelda, and the rest of his strewn generation for who they were and what they did. Sixties nostalgia operated that way too, the pang of regret over who so many of them were (rebels, hippies, wanderers, crusaders) and what they became (reactionaries, office drones, commuters, cynics).

In our media-saturated age, when every couch potato is king, this mode of nostalgia no longer applies.

It isn’t about who we aspired to be as fledglings leaving the nest—full of hopes and dreams and boogying hormones—but about what we watched, played, listened to, downloaded, and identified with as junior consumers. Before the Web became our neural extension, when print and celluloid held reign, the passage of time and the discrimination of critics and enthusiasts winnowed away the flotsam and jetsam of the past, allowing its true achievements and revelatory visions (even those unheralded or derided at the time) to surface and radiate.

The Internet, however, is an inexhaustible suction pump that indiscriminately dredges up the dreck along with the sunken pearls. Search engines are scouring devices, algorithms have no taste buds, and monster Web-site aggregators such as BuzzFeed—which one writer called the Hellmouth of 90s nostalgifying, with its inane quizzes (“Which ‘Dawson’s Creek’ Character Are You?”) and dipstick listicles (“32 Reasons Christmas Was Better in the ’90s”)—are to curating what hoarders are to connoisseurship.