I’m a firm believer most people are good people. After Trump canceled a concert performance for a diverse group of high schoolers, military band members rallied and helped 22 of those students put on the performance.
Category: Pop Culture
Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people
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2025 Barkley Marathon
The Barkley Marathon is a unique and rugged ultramarathon. After 5 people completed the race last year, the race was made more difficult.
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Torpedo baseball bats
Major League Baseball bat science doesn’t change much. Every so often there’s an innovation such as the Yankees and their torpedo bat designed by an MIT physicist.
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Severance is about slavery
An interesting take by Matt Pierce: Severance is about slavery.
Yet “Severance” and its parable about double lives has become hard to watch. Season 1’s subtler commentary about workplace alienation has given way a far more brutally explicit Season 2 plot, which is still being told as a “Lost”-style mystery: What is Lumon up to? There is no mystery about what Lumon is up to. The answer is on the screen in front of you. “Severance” is a titillating luxury TV show about slavery.
Part of the novelty of “Severance” is that the enslaver and the enslaved can share a physical body. Helena Eagan is heir to the Lumon corporation, an upper-level manager, and therefore the captor of the innies whose consciousnesses can’t escape Lumon’s offices. Eagan poses as her innie, Hellie R., to creep among the enslaved innie workforce without their knowledge. Helena Eagan exploits Hellie R.’s budding romantic relationship with an unwitting Mark S. to sleep with him.
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Airline safety videos become entertainment
I don’t fly often, so I guess I missed out on this train, but increasingly, airline safety videos are not filmed on on a plane.
… The airlines weren’t just making safety demonstrations. They were making entertainment, engaging in an arms race to make their safety videos bigger, better, and frankly: more ridiculous.
To track this evolution, I analyzed hundreds of airline safety videos spanning thirty years. And then, I took them apart. I dissected their locations, music, and celebrities.
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How Adolescence pulled off those one takes
Fascinating behind the scenes of how Netfix’s show Adolescence pulled off four one take episodes (steadicam & harness) plus seamlessly attaching a camera to a drone.
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A 500-year history of monsters
Natalie Lawrence goes through 500 years of monsters. Their origins often reflect the society and culture of the time.
At different points through history, individual monsters – both ancient and new – have had their moments in the limelight. They’ve becoming the emblems for specific events, conflicts and concerns that were troubling society at particular times.
The many topical monsters that have emerged over the past half-millenium can offer windows into an ever-shifting cultural psyche. What do they reveal about the zeitgeists of different periods?
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The Opposite of Fascism
I’d quote the whole article, but go read what Anand Giridharadas writes regarding the opposite of fascism.
The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together.
The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.