Tag: Premium

by Dish Staff

Tom Hawking is “100 percent serious” about acknowledging Andrew W.K. (of “Party Hard” fame) as a philosopher for our times. He cites W.K.’s recent response to a reader of his Village Voice advice column who asked him why he’s so obsessed with “partying”:

In his answer to the question, Andrew W.K. took the opportunity to set out his views on life: “I take joy very seriously, and partying is the formal pursuit of celebration itself.” He argues that expression of joy is fundamental to our nature: “Believing that joy is wrong is the most violent disrespect to our inherent nature as loving, pleasure seeking creatures. Let us elevate ourselves and embrace our highest and mightiest capacity for happiness.” And, ultimately, he suggests that it’s from this that one can derive some sort of meaning for existence: “This life is our chance to unleash as much joy onto the world as we can.” Y’know what that is? That’s philosophy.

He evaluates W.K. as a “secular humanist”:

His idea of partying recalls the pleasure principle one of the very earliest humanists, Epicurus (although, in fairness, Epicureanism would probably frown on partying ’til you puke). There’s also a healthy dose of existentialism in there: when he asks “What’s all the rest of this madness for otherwise?”, he’s confronting the concept of the absurd, and in suggesting that the meaning we derive from our lives is “to remain at play and in awe, not to mock the severity of our collective plight, but to truly stay engaged in the bewildering and ferocious grandeur of this adventure we’re on together,” he’s come up with a strategy that sounds a lot more fun than embracing Kierkegaard’s answer (religious faith, basically) or resigning yourself to pushing a Sisyphean rock up a hill for all eternity. … [T]he point is that Andrew W.K. is addressing very similar questions to those that get addressed in philosophy departments around the world every day — and he’s doing so for a much larger audience (including, by the way, that of the student union at Oxford University, where he gave a talk titled “The Philosophy of Partying” a couple of months back.)

by Dish Staff

In a review of Sandra Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination, Bee Wilson traces the history of fictional food:

In a chapter on food in children’s fiction, Gilbert suggests that food fantasies originate in children’s dreams of never-ending bounty. “Lollipop trees and gingerbread houses. Bottles of cherry-tarts mingled with custard, roast turkey, toffee and other goodies. Spoonfuls of sugar.” For most of history, while communities lived in constant fear of the next famine, the culinary imagination was dominated by Rabelaisian excess. In children’s books, we are all still ravenous. We share the hunger of Laura Ingalls Wilder for maple sugar and candy canes. In real life, sugar is now almost as freely available as the gingerbread on the cottage in “Hansel and Gretel,” yet in our bedtime stories it remains a precious commodity. The sweets in the Harry Potter series, whose release coincided with an inexorable rise in childhood obesity, are no less lavish and no less lusted over than those in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Wilson continues, “The nonfiction food writing now aimed at adults contains somewhat different fantasies”:

Gilbert writes of the “postmodern pastorals,” which, rather than inviting us to indulge in rivers of chocolate, create a fantasy of simple self-sufficiency wherein one never eats anything one hasn’t grown or at least cooked oneself, in an imagined recreation of the lifestyle of great-grandmothers. Now the dream is not of plenty but of scarcity: the make-believe idea that we are still governed by the constraints of the seasons. These utopias allow us to pretend that peaches in summer or squash in the fall still have the same force they once did. What is forgotten, Gilbert suggests, is the uncomfortable fact that many peasant great-grandmothers ate “a monotonous and often dangerous diet.”

by Dish Staff

Planning to get blotto, schnockered or plonked this Labor Day weekend? David Crystal reflects on assembling an “almost complete list of every word we’ve ever used to mean ‘drunk'”:

Being drunk cuts across barriers. The list … shows only the occasional indication of a class preference (such as genteel whiffled vs thieves’ cant suckey), and occupational origins are seen only in some nautical expressions (three sheets, oversparred, up the pole, tin hat, honkers), though the etymology is not always definite. There are very few formal terms in the list, apart from a few expressions fostered by the law (intoxicated, over the limit), and some early scholarly words (inebriate(d), temulent, ebrious). Local regional variations are sometimes apparent, such as from Scotland (fou, strut, swash, blootered, swacked), England (bottled, pissed, rat­arsed), and Australia (blue, rotten, shickery, plonked, on one’s ear); and since the eighteenth century most new words in this semantic field have started out in the United States. But it’s rare to find a word that stays in one country for long, and these days online slang dictionaries have largely broken down geographical boundaries.

Why has this field developed to the extent that writers regularly make a special collection of these words?

We see it early on in John Ray’s collection of proverbs (1678) or Benjamin Franklin’s Drinker’s Dictionary (1737), and artful classifications of degrees of drunkenness antedate these (see fox­drunk, 1592). It’s tempting to think that the linguistic innovation is a direct result of the uninhibited behaviour which follows a bout of drinking. Certainly there are some highly idiosyncratic (and often inexplicable) coinages in the list, such as pepst, pottical, fap, paid, muckibus, stocious,and schnockered. Many words are represented by just a single citation. And several seem to be motivated by the sound of the word as much as by any meaning it might have: jingled, whift, whiffled, squiffy, whittled, spiflicated, zonked. 

by Sue Halpern

Buried – sorry – in Biz Carson’s fascinating obituary of Hal Finney, who died this week from ALS, is a small aside with large implications. Finney, who was 58, was the first owner of bitcoins besides developer Satoshi Nakamoto (not his real name). This was in 2008, in a somewhat serendipitous turn of events, which Finney chronicled last year, typing via an eye tracker.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them. After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running… I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me.

So the question is, now that he has died, what happens to Finney’s virtual currency?

It’s the same question any one of us can ask, looking ahead, about our virtual “possessions,” whether they are documents stored on Dropbox, or passwords to our email accounts, or game characters.

Finney, who has been cryogenically preserved, was clearly a forward-looking guy. Before he died, he secured his bitcoins in a safe deposit box. But will it be enough to ensure that his son and daughter inherit them? And what about our stuff, stored “up there,” somewhere, “in the cloud,” where there is no safe deposit box?

Last month, in an unprecedented move, Delaware became the first state to enact a digital inheritance law. The Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act is meant to give authorized individuals brief, “peek and copy” access to third-party accounts. Apparently, the tech companies are not pleased and have formed the “State Privacy and Security Coalition” to fight it. They will be even less pleased when some version of the law is adopted in other states, as it is expected to be:

Jim Halpert of DLA Piper, a law firm that represents the coalition, told the Wall Street Journal that the group opposes the laws because accounts may contain information the deceased do not want to disclose, and because they may “conflict with a 1986 federal law forbidding consumer electronic-communications companies from disclosing digital content without its owner’s consent.”

But Jeff John Roberts thinks this is weak:

Neither of these explanations are particularly convincing, however. Despite the companies’ profession of privacy concerns for their late users, the reality is that people have been dying — and leaving behind artifacts for relatives and others to find — for a very long time. The digital dimensions of our personal lives don’t change that.

[Note to self: do not leave will on iCloud.]

(Photo of bitcoins by Steve Garfield)

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Rebecca Mead describes the challenges Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard has faced as a prominent female academic:

At Cambridge [in 1972], the inequities of gender began to dawn on Beard. “Most of the people who taught us in the faculty were blokes,” she says. “There were only twelve per cent women among the students, and you thought, Actually, there is an issue here. You go into a dining hall of a men’s college, and everybody’s portrait was a bloke. Well, perhaps some female founder back in 1512, some lady who gave the cash—and everyone else was a bloke. For the first time I saw that, somehow, I was there as sort of a favor.” She attended women’s groups and joined campaigns to open the university further to women. The women of Cambridge were undertaking more personal voyages of discovery, too: in a drawer somewhere in Beard’s house is a plastic speculum that she acquired at one consciousness-raising gathering.

Beard left Cambridge in 1979, for King’s College London. She completed her Ph.D. in 1982; two years later, she returned to Newnham as a fellow. At the time, she says, she was one of only three women on the classics faculty, out of a total of twenty-six; before long, both of her female colleagues left. (Now there are roughly four men to each woman.)

That was then. Today, explains Mead, Beard is active on social media, and holds her own in an ongoing battle with the ubiquitous misogynistic troll contingent. Mead addresses the particularity of how Beard, whom “the Queen recently appointed … to the Order of the British Empire,” battles lesser names (or the altogether anonymous):

There is, [Beard] acknowledges, an irony in the imbalance of power: as a prominent scholar, she does have a voice, however unpleasant the threats to silence her may be. Most of her Twitter detractors are grumbling to only a handful of followers, at least until she amplifies their audience.

Mead’s article brought to mind a pattern I’ve noticed within feminism, which I’ve called the Second After Sartre problem, namely that of women who aren’t merely privileged but are major leaders of their age, who call out the obstacles that prevent them from achieving what their male equivalents can, or from doing so as easily. It’s in reference to… I’ll let Lisa Appignanesi explain the story I’m referencing:

De Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 when they were both studying for the aggregation in philosophy, the elite French graduate degree. De Beauvoir came second to Sartre’s first, though the examiners agreed she was strictly the better philosopher and at the age of 21 the youngest person ever to have sat the exam. But Sartre, the future author of Being and Nothingness, was bold, ingenious, exuberant in his youthful excess, the satirical rebel who shouted, “Thus pissed Zarathustra” as he hurled water bombs out of classroom windows.

Being second after Sartre, when you should have been first, is indeed an injustice. Injustices that occur at the top – ones well beyond the First World Problem-ness of having-it-all feminism – are instructive (if even the most elite, confident women face sexism, perhaps sexism is actually a thing!), and of course it matters if the tippy-top of whichever hierarchy is open to all who qualify. But the trouble is that we end up hearing a wildly disproportionate amount about such injustices, because, well, who gives lectures at the British Museum? It can start to feel as if feminism is primarily about recognizing the achievements of the most accomplished women. That’s part of what feminism should be, but perhaps not quite so big a part.

See also (my grievances with) “mansplaining.” Rebecca Solnit’s article, “Men who explain things,” which more or less launched the concept, was about a man trying to explain to Solnit a topic she had just written a book about. That is… not the usual situation. More often, in cases where a man conflates maleness with superior expertise, the man and the woman know approximately as much (or as little) about the topic. Neither is likely to be a certified expert. What if a woman wishes to speak and she isn’t the world’s greatest genius? Men who fail to meet that standard have been known to say their piece.

This is my roundabout way of saying why I’m so curious about Roxane Gay’s writing. From Lucy McKeon’s review of Gay’s two new books:

Amidst Anne-Marie Slaughter’s talk of “having it all” and Sheryl Sandberg’s talk of “leaning in,” Gay’s Bad Feminist, a collection of essays of cultural criticism, offers a complex and multifarious feminism to answer the movement’s ongoing PR issues, its flaws and its failures. Gay’s is a feminism for the ignorant and misinformed as much as for the historically excluded and ignored. Analyzing a wide range of material—from 12 Years a Slave to the Sweet Valley High series, from the reality TV trope “I’m not here to make friends” to the gendered politics of likeability in fiction, from professional sports to Tyler Perry, from the fallout of mass tragedy to legislative control of women’s reproductive rights—Bad Feminist surveys culture and politics from the perspective of one of the most astute critics writing today.

Yes, the time has come for “a feminism for the ignorant and misinformed as much as for the historically excluded and ignored.” It couldn’t have come soon enough.

by Dish Staff

Jesse Bering reviews research suggesting that not only can people accurately match dogs’ faces to their owners, but also that “our faces also bear an uncanny resemblance to the frontend views of our automobiles.” Participants in a study were given a picture of a car and asked to rank its possible owners on a scale of 1 to 6:

[T]he authors suspected that the judges in their study would be able to match cars with their correct owners above chance levels. And that’s what they found. “The real owner was in fact assigned rank 1 most frequently,” they write, “and rank 6 least frequently.” This proved true regardless of the subjects’ sex and age. There were an equal number of male and female judges, and they ranged widely in age—from 16 to 78 years. In case the sheer bizarreness of these data hasn’t quite registered, let me put it to you more bluntly: The average person can detect a physical similarity in the “faces” of cars and their owners. …

Implied in these results is the startling fact that most car owners are unwittingly purchasing cars that look like them. If that’s the case, figured [researchers Stefan] Stiegar and [Martin] Voracek, then is it possible that judges can even take it one step further, matching dogs to their masters’ cars? After all, we know now that it’s not a myth: dogs really do look like their owners. And since we choose both cars and dogs that physically resemble us, shouldn’t our dogs and our cars look alike too? Here, frankly, the data just get weird. Nevertheless, they’re genuine. In their third and final study, the authors added 36 portraits of dogs into the mix. Half of these were of purebreds, and the others were mutts. In a twist to the previous studies, a new group of judges saw an image of a car (again, either the front, side, or rear view) and beneath that, six individual dogs. Subjects ranked each dog on the likelihood of its master being the owner of the car shown. Amazingly, the participants were able to pull this feat off as well.

Meanwhile, Laura Bliss considers the oddly human attachments people form to their vehicles:

To many of us, [cars] are beloved, person-like companions. More than 70 percent of respondents to a recent AutoTrader survey were at least “somewhat” if not “very attached” to their cars, with 36 percent describing their vehicle as “an old friend.” In another study, nearly half of all drivers assigned a gender to their cars, and about one-third actually name them.

For many car-owners, emotional attachment can also come hand-in-hand with socio-economic mobility. For example, there’s research that suggests for certain low-income families, owning a car is linked to the ability to live in neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and lower health risks, as well as higher neighborhood satisfaction and stronger chances of employment.

Car-owners often assign human-like attributes to our cars, too. A 2006 study found significant differences between how participants understood their own personality and how they described their cars’.  And in that same AutoTrader report, more than a quarter said they felt “sad” when they thought about parting ways with their internally combusting pal.

by Dish Staff

An 11-year-old DFW superfan recreated Infinite Jest with Legos:

[English professor Kevin] Griffith and his son [Sebastian] had the idea to “translate” Infinite Jest into Lego after reading Brendan Powell Smith’s The Brick Bible, which takes on the New Testament. “Wallace’s novel is probably the only contemporary text to offer a similar challenge to artists working in the medium of Lego,” they write, grandly, on their website. …

Sebastian didn’t read Infinite Jest himself. “Let me be clear – Infinite Jest is not a novel for children,” says Griffith. “Instead, I would describe a scene to him and he would recreate it in a way that suited his vision.  All the scenes are created by him and he then took photos of them using a 10-year-old Kodak digital camera he received for a present long ago.  I think that having the scenes reflect an 11-year-old’s perspective gives them a little extra poignancy, maybe.”

The caption for the above image is from page 409 of Infinite Jest: “Clipperton plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left temple.” Meanwhile, Matthew Nolan looks for lessons from DFW about why American men aren’t playing the sport better:

Wallace’s discerning tennis essays and fiction made it clear that elite tennis players cannot simply be manufactured through training by academies and player development programs. The fact that there are aspects of success that go beyond the academy helps to explain why the current top 20 players in the world represent 14 different countries, and almost all come from different training backgrounds. The recent success of junior male players, like U.S. Open Wild Card Noah Rubin from the training facility run by John McEnroe (another Wallace favorite), will excite Americans, but enthusiasm needs to be tempered with Wallace-ian recognition of the nature of the game. Wallace would not likely have lamented the state of American men’s tennis but instead would have probably sympathized with the ongoing struggles of all players, regardless of national origin. Likening tennis to life itself, a veteran player and coach in Infinite Jest respectfully sums up the game: “It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.”

(Image via Brickjest)

by Dish Staff

We know that the world’s slums are growing, but are the world’s major urban centers growing into slums? Joel Kotkin details the massive social, economic, and environmental challenges facing most emerging megacities:

Emerging megacities like Kinshasa or Lima do not command important global niches. Their problems are often ignored or minimized by those who inhabit what commentator Rajiv Desai has described as “the VIP zone of cities,” where there is “reliable electric power, adequate water supply, and any sanitation at all.” Outside the zone, Desai notes, even much of the middle class have to “endure inhuman conditions” of congested, cratered roads, unreliable energy, and undrinkable water.

The slums of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, swell by as many as 400,000 new migrants each year. Some argue that these migrants are better off than previous slum dwellers since they ride motorcycles and have cellphones. Yet access to the wonders of transportation and “information technology” don’t compensate for physical conditions demonstrably worse than those endured even by Depression-era poor New Yorkers. My mother’s generation at least could drink water out of a tap and expect consistent electricity, if the bill was paid, something not taken for granted by their modern-day counterparts (PDF) in the developing world. … Over these environmental problems loom arguably greater social ones. Many of the megacities—including the fastest growing, Dhaka—are essentially conurbations dominated by very-low-income people; roughly 70 percent of Dhaka households earn less than $170 (U.S.) a month, and many of them far less. “The megacity of the poor,” is how the urban geographer Nazrul Islam describes his hometown.