The Dish

A cool new TED-Ed animation explains why we love repetition in music:

As professor Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis wrote earlier this year:

Cultures all over the world make repetitive music. The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois counts repetitiveness among the few musical universals known to characterise music the world over. Hit songs on American radio often feature a chorus that plays several times, and people listen to these already repetitive songs many times. The musicologist David Huron at Ohio State University estimates that, during more than 90 per cent of the time spent listening to music, people are actually hearing passages that they’ve listened to before. The play counter in iTunes reveals just how frequently we listen to our favourite tracks. And if that’s not enough, tunes that get stuck in our heads seem to loop again and again. In short, repetition is a startlingly prevalent feature of music, real and imagined.

This week’s short story, Andre Dubus’ “Killings” (pdf), is notable not just for the way it portrays the way one family grieves, but for being turned into a brilliant film by director Todd Field, In the Bedroom. We suggest reading the story – it’s not long – then watching the movie counterpart. Here’s how the story begins:

On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt’s older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said: ‘I should kill him.’ He was twenty-eight, his brown hair starting to thin in front where he used to have a cowlick. He bit his lower lip, wiped his eyes, then said it again. Ruth’s arm, linked with Matt’s, tightened; he looked at her. Beneath her eyes there was swelling from the three days she had suffered. At the limousine Matt stopped and looked back at the grave, the casket, and the Congregationalist minister who he thought had probably had a difficult job with the eulogy though he hadn’t seemed to, and the old funeral director who was saying something to the six young pallbearers. The grave was on a hill and overlooked the Merrimack, which he could not see from where he stood; he looked at the opposite bank, at the apple orchard with its symmetrically planted flees going up a hill.

Keep reading here. You can also find “Killings” in Dubus’ Selected Stories. Rent In the Bedroom here. Peruse previous SSFSs here.

A researcher who studies the environmental effectiveness of recycling admits that he “can’t stand” the plastic-bag ban:

Part of the reason can be found in the quote you cited:

Although plastic bags’ manufacture is relatively energy intensive (according to the Australian government, a car could drive 36 feet with the amount of petroleum used to make a single plastic bag) …

Doesn’t the author realize that she has just refuted herself? The proper gist of that sentence is:

Plastic bag manufacture is remarkably energy-cheap (a car could drive 36 feet with the amount of petroleum used to make a single plastic bag).

Thirty-six feet is a little more than four parking spaces. What the writer is saying – and this is a fact – is that if you recycle your plastic bags, you literally burn more fuel driving across the parking lot to the recycling bin than you save by recycling!  It’s just another example of innumeracy that such an argument can actually be made in favor of the ban.

He adds:

The plastic bag ban is a valid policy approach for exactly one environmental hazard: litter, and specifically marine litter.  In that perspective, a sharp curtailment of use would be greatly welcome, as long as it is done with knowledge of the fact that many of the alternatives (paper bags, laundered reusable bags) are significantly more energy- and resource-intensive than plastic bags.

Anyway, in terms of the energy demands of a reasonably comfortable western lifestyle, bag choice is more or less trivial. If people are looking to reduce their carbon footprint, they should take those reusable bags and hoof it down the sidewalk instead of driving.

Another reader spots an apparent error in the history of plastic bags we referenced:

The chronology mentions reports of suffocation occurring in 1959, but I believe that had to do with the plastic used to cover dry-cleaned clothing.  The plastic used for that purpose was very flimsy and clingy, which is what caused the suffocation hazard.  There’s a scene in “Mad Men” in the first season where Sally is walking around in the plastic and Betty berates her not for wearing the plastic but for possibly wrinkling the clothes.

The Wikipedia entry for plastic bags says that the patent for the material was in 1965, so I don’t think plastic bags were ever in use prior to that time.  I don’t remember plastic bags on the scene until the early eighties.  Most grocery store paper bags that I remember from the sixties and seventies did not have handles.  I think those came later in response to the plastic.

Our reader appears to be correct. Jeffrey L. Meikle, in his American Plastic: A Cultural History, describes the suffocation deaths of 80 children as the “dry-cleaning bag tragedy of 1959.”

Graeme Wood flags research from David Skarbek, author of The Social Order of the Underworld, suggesting that prison gangs play an indispensable role in maintaining order in California penitentiaries:

“Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,” he says. “They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.” … For example, consider the Aryan Brotherhood – a notoriously brutal organization whose members are often kept alone in cells because they tend to murder their cell mates. You can take the Brotherhood at its word when it declares itself a racist organization, and you can do the same with the Black Guerrilla Family, which preaches race war and calls for the violent overthrow of the government. But Skarbek says that at lights-out in some prisons, the leader of each gang will call out good night to his entire cellblock. The sole purpose of this exercise is for each gang leader to guarantee that his men will respect the night’s silence. If a white guy starts yelling and keeps everyone awake, the Aryan Brothers will discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attack one of their members. White power is one thing, but the need to keep order and get shut-eye is paramount.

Thomas Herbich captured the surprising elegance of cigarette smoke:

Over the last three months photographer Thomas Herbrich snapped some 100,000 individual photographs of smoke, looking for unexpected anamalies and fortuitous coincidences where familiar shapes emerged. It’s fascinating to see how the brain tries to create order out of chaos, just like looking up at the clouds, suddenly familiar patterns seem to stand out: faces, hands, or scrolls of paper.

Herbich spoke to D.L. Cade about the project:

I was very surprised by how extremely quickly smoke move[s]. It’s easier to photograph a racing car! The rising of cigarette-smoke is actually so quick that conventional flash equipment is too slow, as is the photographer – only a few milliseconds pass between recognition of the subject and the taking of the shot, a length of time in which the smoke has already changed again.

I therefore used a quick flash with a flash duration of 1/10000 sec. or faster – and took more than 100,000 digital photos in three months (which killed one camera). The “poor” photos were immediately separated out on the laptop and rejected. Only 20 or so of the photos actually made the shortlist.

See more of his work here.