Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

Today, Friday, March 21, 2pm, the guest on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, will be Alan Lightman, author of the book, The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science, Including the Original Papers.

This November 2005 re-broadcast looks at how insight has influenced the discovery process in science, but, even more, why the last century’s greatest scientific discoveries, like those of Max Planck, above, formulator of quantum theory, are actually considered great.

Memphis native Alan Lightman received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. His novels include Einstein’s Dreams, Good Benito, The Diagnosis, and Reunion. He lives in Massachusetts, and is an adjunct professor of humanities at MIT.

If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check NONFICTION via our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

For weeks, I’ve been trying to get the word out on an underreported paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley: According to these researchers, many Americans subconsciously associate Black people with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against Black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.

Those findings, researched over a six-year period, were printed February 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.

Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is Black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. “This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done,” she said. “This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the Black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick it up every time.”

When colleague Ray Winbush forwarded me the LeBron James/Gisele Bündchen VOGUE cover, above, my first raw thought was that James looked bestial. They look like King Kong and Fay Wray. Is it just me? Am I just imagining this?

Intriguing article in the New York Times a week ago—as part of Dan Barry’s fascinating “This Land” series—on “double-proxy weddings,” performed only in Montana. Through the process, couples who cannot meet physically in order to be married have stand-ins do the job for them.

“Ceremony No. 1,” says the judge, Heidi Ulbricht. That would be the marriage between two members of the Air Force far, far removed from this room in the Flathead County Courthouse. The real groom is 7,300 miles away, in Qatar, while the real bride is merely 1,700 miles away, in Kentucky.

“We are gathered here today in the presence of these witnesses to join in holy matrimony this man and this woman, who have applied for and received a marriage license from the state,” the judge says.

Turning to Sarah Knapton, 22, college student and professional proxy bride, she asks: “Will you have this man by proxy to be your lawful wedded husband, and with him to live together in holy matrimony pursuant to the laws of God and this state?”

“I do,” answers Ms. Knapton, elbow on table, chin in hand.

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If you convinced about two hundred people to make the background noise of an excited TV studio audience, then yelled this set of otherwise unassociated nouns at one of your closest friends…

Farmers Markets!

Standing Still at Concerts!

Japan!

Arrested Development!

Awareness!

Hating their parents!

Marathons

Mos Def!

…passing Plutonians could be forgiven for thinking they’d tuned into the latest edition of the new and recapitalized $1,000,000 Pyramid.

But they wouldn’t have. They’d just be hearing someone reading from Christian Lander’s hilarious new blog, StuffWhitePeopleLike (SWPL). (Thanks to writer Robert Morales for sending the link.)

Each of its (thus far) seventy-six entries, starting with “Coffee,” and going, apparently in no particular order, to “Bottles of Water,” captures some aspect of the dominant culture’s fascinating peccadilloes, lightly narrating the reasons why white people can’t get enough of living by the water (#51), snowboarding (#31), Michel Gondry (#68), or, sigh, difficult breakups (#70):

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Changing the ribbon on a typewriter. Operating an overhead projector. PASCAL-TurboPASCAL. Looking up a business in the Yellow Pages. Mounting photographic slides in slide mounts. Specializing in the distribution, marketing, sales, and repair of HD-DVD players.

If you’re reading my blog at work, and your job is doing any of these, you might wanna just keep reading my blog.

I came across these stats a week ago:

In 2005, the U.S.-led Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria made a financial commitment to attacking those diseases in Uganda. The grant package’s worth totaled $367 million.

In 2008, according to the National Retail Federation, Valentine’s Day spending on U.S. pets was expected to reach $367 million.