Tag: Premium

Adedamola Osinulu argues that dramatic growth of African Pentecostal churches in the US “demands a change in how we, in both secular and religious America, understand our relationship to African Christians and Christianity as a whole”:

Africans’ interest in Pentecostalism was fueled by literature emanating from North America in the 1970s and ’80s. But, as one example of how they re-shaped Pentecostal theology to be more responsive to local practitioners’ material conditions, they presented a God who is deeply invested in believers’ fiscal and physical well-being in the present, not just the fate of their souls in the after-life. Amidst the swirling political and economic crises of the postcolonial state, this was an immensely attractive proposition.

Conceiving themselves as part of a global religious community, they began to export their brand of Christianity around the globe. As a result, we find that the largest single congregation in Europe, the 25,000-member Embassy of God, is a Pentecostal church founded by a Nigerian man. Today the largest African Pentecostal organizations are sending so-called “reverse-missionaries” to North America and Europe. One of those groups, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), founded in Nigeria, has 15,000 parishes around the globe including at least one in every major North American city.

Last month, Jason Margolis reported on the RCCG’s efforts in America. Keating’s take-away from the piece:

American missionaries played an important part of spreading the faith around the world, but one question posed by researchers is whether the transmission would reverse: Would any of the hundreds of new denominations sprouting up in Africa cross the Atlantic and gain adherents in the United States? The decentralized structure of Pentecostalism leads to new branches and churches being created more quickly than in other forms of Christianity.

Margolis’ reporting on the Redeemed Christian Church of God seems to indicate we haven’t hit that point yet. The church’s members are nearly all Nigerian or African immigrants, and it has had a hard time expanding beyond those communities. But the Catholic Church certainly isn’t the only Christian denomination whose geographical center of gravity is shifting.

Previous Dish on the rise of African Pentecostalism here.

Johanna Fairview makes her living narrating erotica audiobooks:

[F]or real, people buy them. One of my best-selling audiobooks is a book that is so bad I created a second pseudonym to record under, because I didn’t even want my first fake name associated with it. It was a collection of short erotic stories that were so terrible the author included a recipe for meatballs when he ran out of ideas. But I sexy-read the shit out of it, and last month I received a royalty check for $623.30.

What it takes to succeed in the industry:

There are various skill levels when it comes to dirty-book reading.

I humblebrag and mambleyag that I am remarkably good at it. I’ve got a nice, low voice that easily sounds like a man’s or a woman’s (important for sexy-reading scenes between male and female characters); I’ve got suitcases of character voices, an ear for accents and years of experience storytelling and doing solo performance. I’ve got no problem locking myself in a closet for two days in order to finish a nine-hour book. (I’m proud to say that my studio has graduated to a walk-in closet from underneath the comforter in the middle of the floor). I love learning new words and proper pronunciations and playing all the parts, no matter how cheesy or racy or weird the script may be.

I won’t lie though: it’s kind of hard being so happy with my job, but not really being able to share my work with most of my friends and family. I’ve played clips for my boyfriend and a few close friends, but aside from that, most people get a weird look on their face when I hint at the bisexual paranormal three-way I narrated today.

(Photo: Screenshot of the current top-selling erotic audiobook on Audible.com)

Margaret Talbot pivots off the “bossy” debate:

There are precedents for such reclaiming—pejorative words like “queer” and even “slut,” for instance, which their targets have taken over and brandished with pride. But maybe a more apt comparison would be the word “nerd.” “Nerd” used to be a put-down—and it used to cover boys more often than girls. Like “bossy,” it wasn’t really that harsh, but it wasn’t nice, either. It actually had a gender dimension, too, because it called out brainy boys who were not athletic or aggressive. It was a dis of boys who lived in their heads and wore pocket protectors and ate their lunch indoors, playing chess. Just as “bossy” might be said to undermine female leadership, “nerd” might be said to have undermined male intellectualism.

But now “nerd,” and its close cousin “geek,” are words that lots of people are happy to identify with, humble-bragging about their obsessive expertise.

Update from a reader:

If you’re going to talk about the (mis)appropriation of “nerd,” you gotta include this Portlandia PSA; it’s weirdly heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time:

In another video from the TV writer and showrunner, he shares one of his least favorite plot conveniences:

The Bill Pullman reference he makes is from Sleepless In Seattle (representative clip here). With regards to another set of cliches the Mars series avoided, Nolan Feeney praises the show’s complex depiction of inequality:

Race and class are often intertwined in [the show’s fictional town of] Neptune, but Veronica Mars often served as a good reminder that they’re not to be conflated. One of the series’ recurring conflicts is between the PCH Bike Club, a largely Latino motorcycle gang, and the obnoxious 09ers, rich kids from Neptune’s über-wealthy 90909 zip code, but the show never suggests only white kids can be rich kids and only minorities can be poor. Jackie Cook, a second-season addition played by Tessa Thompson, was both black and one of the richest girls in school. In one episode, while investigating a series of muggings, a classmate tips Veronica off that the culprit might be targeting the “coconuts”—Latino and Latina students criticized for being “brown on the outside, white on the [inside].” The PCH gang does engage in criminal activity, but their crimes are repeatedly contrasted against the transgressions of the rich, which are often worse. And in Season Two, it’s a rival gang made up of mostly working-class Irish-Catholics that’s dealing the hard drugs (to the parents of 09ers) and making people “disappear.” Veronica Mars didn’t entirely subvert stereotypes, but it usually tried to at least complicate and challenge them.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross adds that the series also took on rape in ways no other show had:

Exceptionally smart writing and acting aside, the date rape story-line is what made this particular teen drama different from all that ones that aired before it. Unlike most televised rape accounts, Veronica was no damsel in distress waiting to be rescued. She had agency and was given a voice that went deeper and was more honest than any of its predecessors. Throughout the television show, Veronica has nightmares about the night she was assaulted. Viewers also find out in the second season that Veronica has an STI as a result of her rape, making the assault all the more realistic. Needless to say, the teenager ends up developing a keen distrust of the men around her, affecting all her future relationships throughout the show. But despite getting laughed out of the police chief’s office when she comes forward about her ordeal, Veronica never loses sight of the fact that she is not to blame for her rape—and neither do the show’s viewers, who are treated to a dramatic story-line that is both realistic and empowering. For fans and haters alike, Veronica Mars remains the only American television series that successfully depicts the long-term effects of this type of sexual violence.

In our final video from Rob, he explains why he always wanted the character of Veronica to be written as a “porcupine”:

Rob Thomas is an American producer, director and screenwriter, best known for the TV series Veronica Mars and Party Down. A year ago, he launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time in support of the Mars movie. (Our discussion thread of the innovative, Dish-like project is here.) The movie is now out in theaters and video-on-demand. Rob’s previous Ask Anything videos are here.

(Ask Anything Archive)

A reader joins the discussion on the comparative appeal of languages:

Count me as one vote against the beauty supremacy of French – though it may just be my frustration with either reproducing or understanding its pronunciation. I was surprised to read Dreher’s opinion that swept all East Asian tongues under the same blanket! In college I switched from studying Japanese to Chinese in part because I grew enamored of the sounds I overheard in my Chinese-speaking friends’ conversations (Japanese to me sounds elegant, but not really beautiful). And while Mandarin Chinese is music to my ears (except in the sibilant Taiwan accent), Cantonese actually makes my stomach turn a bit.

I also find German rather gorgeous, especially the way it tends to be spoken by women. I can’t listen to any Scandinavian language with a straight face.

English went astray, aesthetically speaking, with its hard A and I sounds … but it indeed has many lovely specimens, like the word “resplendent,” for example. And English’s melting-pot nature also confers the advantage that one can select words originating from different language families for their sonic and cultural associations. Basic examples would be using tons of straight-from-Latin words to sound legalistic, old Germanic ones to be punchy and down-to earth, or French cognates to sound poetic and fussy.

Another:

Your post on how languages sound reminded me of one of my all-time favorite clips from the Catherine Tate show. I’ve probably watched it a dozen times, and it still makes me laugh every time:

Helen Gao isn’t surprised that The Catcher In The Rye continues to captivate Chinese readers:

In the 1980s, the novel’s attack on conservative social mores resonated with the liberal and iconoclastic zeitgeist of a newly opened China; in the early 1990s, its cynic and frustrated tone gave expression to the despondency of Chinese youth, who had just seen their democratic ideals crushed by the massacre of student protesters in central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The 21st century, which has brought China unprecedented material wealth and social inequality, has granted the book new relevance.

Huo Er Deng, or the Chinese incarnation of Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye’s protagonist, speaks a language uncannily similar to that of a stressed student in a competitive Shanghai high school, or a disgruntled migrant worker serving a difficult boss, or a bored scion – in Chinese slang “rich second generation” – struggling to lead a meaningful life. Indeed, who would understand “phony” better than a generation weighed down by spiritual discontentment and the pressures of modern life, one whose grievances are still muffled by party control?

In September, Reed Johnson noted that Russians feel a similar affection for the book they call Over the Abyss in Rye:

First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the 1960s, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society. For a postwar intelligentsia chafing under repressive Communist rule, Holden Caulfield’s voice was electrifying – who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language? Teenagers adopted their hero’s speech patterns—or their Russian equivalents – even though the world of The Catcher in the Rye, with its private schools, hotel trysts, and jazz clubs, existed across a great abyss.

Human rights groups have criticized the Globe Theater for planning to take a touring production to North Korea:

The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright’s birth. “We do not believe that anyone should be excluded from the chance to experience this play,” the theatre said in a statement.

But Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said exclusion would be the order of the day if the performance went ahead in Pyongyang. “It’s going to be an extremely limited, elite audience that would see a production in any case,” Robertson told AFP on Tuesday. “It would have to be in Pyongyang, which is a showcase city whose residents are selected to live there because they have shown their loyalty,” Robertson said. “So there’s a strict pre-selection process involved right from the off.”… Amnesty International urged the theatre to “read up” on the reality of North Korea before going there. “No tragic play could come close to the misery that the 100,000 people trapped in the country’s prison camps endure – where torture, rape, starvation and execution are everyday occurrences,” Amnesty said in a statement.

Mark Lawson thinks the Globe should go ahead with the tour, arguing that North Korea is not apartheid-era South Africa:

The obvious reference point in any discussion about which stamps actors should have on their passports is the boycott of South Africa by the theatrical union Equity and other representatives of the entertainment industry, which ran from 1965 until the Mandela presidency. … [T]here was a solid logic to the embargo on exporting drama to South Africa. The plays would be performed in venues operating a policy of segregation, with the result that touring productions participated in and legitimized apartheid. The governments during the discriminatory years also strictly censored the sort of material that was admitted.

Hateful as the North Korean regime is, the situation is significantly different. The Globe will presumably have no control over the makeup of the audience, but the choice of play is its own, and the use of Shakespeare’s plays as a weapon against repression has an honorable history.

Zeljka Marosevic looks back at that “honorable history”:

When Prague was under the rule of Russia, the Czech author and philosopher Pavel Kohout ran a politically charged production of Macbeth, and the staging of this was later used as the basis for Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth. Not only this, but PEN actively encouraged Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller to go to Turkey in 1985; “when the dramatists challenged the prevailing political climate so fiercely that they were ejected from a dinner at the US embassy.” And it’s not just Shakespeare that has been used as a kind of theatrical intervention. Susan Sontag’s staging of a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo made its mark in a city that was undergoing the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.

Meanwhile, Tierney Sneed marvels at how dramatically attitudes toward cultural diplomacy have changed in less than 10 years:

In 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang upon invitation from the North Korean government amid US efforts to engage North Korea in nuclear weapons talks. When the Philharmonic agreed to play in 2007, a George W. Bush administration official defended the trip – which the State Department helped to coordinate – calling it a sign that “North Korea is beginning to come out of its shell,” and that it represented “a shift in how they view us, and it’s the sort of shift that can be helpful as we go forward in nuclear weapons negotiations.” PBS even broadcast the concert.

However attitudes toward North Korea have changed since Kim Jong Un took over upon his father Kim Jong Il’s 2011 death, says Sheila Smith, a senior fellow in Asia studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. “There’s now an increasing hesitancy to allow informal arts diplomacy between [North Korea] and other countries” she says, as the regime under Kim Jong Un has engaged in increasingly provocative behavior. … “It can actually run the risk of enhancing a regime that is guilty of oppression,” Smith says.

Walter Kirn’s new book Blood Will Out is an account of his friendship with the conman and murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who charmed many in high society under the alias Clark Rockefeller. In an excerpt from the book, Kirn considers the place of the impostor in the American imagination – and his own complicity in “Rockefeller’s” deception:

The kidnapping, which made international news and later inspired a TV movie, exposed Clark Rockefeller as a fraud, the most prodigious serial impostor in recent history. It also connected him to a lineage older, and in a certain fashion richer, than that of the founding family of Standard Oil: the shape-shifting trickster of American myth and literature. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, this figure takes the form of a mutating devil aboard a riverboat who feeds on his fellow passengers’ moral defects. In Huckleberry Finn, he again stalks the Mississippi River as the Duke and the Dauphin, flamboyant mock aristocrats whose swindles are cloaked in Elizabethan claptrap. In The Great Gatsby he’s a preening gangster sprouted from a North Dakota farm boy. In Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels he’s a murderous social-climbing dilettante. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 he’s Milo Minderbinder, the blithe wheeler-dealer who’d blow up the world if he saw a profit in it. He’s the villain with a thousand faces, a kind of charming, dark-side cowboy, perennially slipping off into the sunset and reappearing at dawn in a new outfit.

But if Clark was all that (I’d learn after the trial that he understood his literary provenance and took great pride in it), then what was I?

A fool. A stubborn fool. When his story began to unravel during the manhunt, and the Rockefellers claimed not to know him, I told a fellow reporter that they were lying, a family of cowards running from a scandal. I only backed down when his German name was published and the word Lebensraum echoed through my head. The disclosure unsettled me but it also softened me, especially when more facts about his background trickled out in the days after his capture. I too had a German name and German blood, and I’d spent a summer during college living in Bavaria, his home province. I was 18 then, about the same age he was when, in 1979, two years before my stay in Munich, he left the small town of his youth for the United States. I’d left my own small town that year, for Princeton. I knew the yearning. No wonder we’d been friends.

Laura Miller calls the work “an absorbing spectacle of self-surgery,” detailing the psychology of the mark as well as that of the con man. Meanwhile, Meg Wolitzer shivers:

[T]he way Kirn tells it all makes me feel it’s entirely possible that I too might’ve allowed Clark Rockefeller to stay in my life because of a kind of lazy vanity and the pleasurable, ongoing thought that a really rich and powerful person likes me – despite the fact that I don’t like him at all. Even as the absurdities mount up, I could still imagine passively allowing a joyless friendship to continue. Life can feel so ordinary. You get up in the morning, you go to work, you pay taxes like all the other poor schlubs. The idea that someone in your midst doesn’t have to do any of that opens up a little fantasy door in the brain, a door unlocked by a pathetic magic key.

J.D. Tuccille considers the effects of having too much work outside the classroom:

A study, published last year in the Journal of Experimental Education, takes a dim view of the heavy workloads under which high school kids in “10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class communities” stagger. Results indicated that students in these schools average more than three hours of homework per night. Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives. Which is to say, even if you think that homework can be a good thing, there’s a limit. More is not better, say researchers from Stanford University, Lewis and Clark College, and Villanova University.

Granted, those “upper-middle-class communities” may not be the most broadly representative; the average American high schooler spends about an hour and a half on homework per day. But as Misty Adoniou points out, even modest amounts of homework may widen achievement gaps:

Research finds that homework doesn’t improve learning outcomes in primary school, and has a weak link to improved outcomes in junior high school. Those improvements are connected to parental involvement – but parents who are keen supporters of homework may be disappointed to hear that their positive contribution is largely just ensuring their children hand in their homework. …

There are many parents, dedicated and desperately interested in their children’s education, who cannot involve themselves in their children’s homework. They may not have had schooling opportunities themselves, they may speak English as an additional language, they may work long hours or shifts, or they may just be like most of us, and simply can’t remember what a quadratic equation is. Those with spare cash buy the homework support, in the form of after hours tutoring. In high school, where homework tasks contribute substantially to the course grade, homework is the great unequalizer.

What an amazing portrait of San Francisco! http://t.co/oSK0Iz6R

— Zach Klein (@zachklein) July 25, 2012

In New York magazine, Kevin Roose suggests that “in many ways, San Francisco is the nation’s new success theater”:

It’s no secret that New York is having a bit of an identity crisis these days. Wall Street lost its swagger during the crash and hasn’t gotten it back despite the market’s broader recovery. Big banks are adding employees in Bangalore and Salt Lake City while cutting them in Manhattan. New York City’s budget wonks expect the city to add only 67,000 jobs this year, a sluggish number that faster-growing cities like Denver and Austin will look upon with pity. The city’s culture seems to be changing, too: Greenpoint and “normcore” are in, stilettos and pinstripes are out; junior bankers now get Saturdays off; “work-life balance” is no longer a euphemism for sloth.

Meanwhile, certain pockets of San Francisco have become the sort of gilded playground that New York once was. Brand-new Teslas with vanity plates like DISRUPTD drift down the streets of the Mission District, where pawnshops and porn stores used to be. Paper millionaires spend their nights at the Battery, a members-­only club with a tech-heavy roster and a $10,000-per-night penthouse suite. … It’s the city where dreamers go to prove themselves – the place where just being able to afford a normal life serves as an indicator of pluck and ability.

In SFist, Jay Barmann retorts:

I’m still not clear on the part about how we “don’t quite know what to do with [our] wealth,” apart from the digs about how SF men don’t dress up very much. We clearly spend all of our money on rent, food, and booze, and many of us do buy nice clothes and cars and things, and those with lots of money go buy houses in Napa or in Tahoe. But it’s true, we are less inclined to embrace asshole behavior, unapologetic displays, and the giddy capitalist fervor that has made Manhattan a bohemia-free retail Disneyland where no one ever thought twice about bulldozing a building to build something newer and bigger.

It’s hard if you’ve lived in both cities not to compare them, but I would argue that while most San Franciscans might long for the nightlife of certain eras of New York’s past, they’ve never wanted the city to become New York. And while many a trapped New Yorker who has visited or lived here dreams of an easier life in the west, they usually resign themselves to the fact that economically, and career-wise, there isn’t enough happening here. If that changes permanently, and there are more and more opportunities here, what excuses will they have left for staying in New York?