What Sort of a Story is Climate Change? | What's On | Free Word Centre. What Sort of Story is Climate Change? Launches the book Culture and Climate Change: Narratives. The event will explore the book’s key arguments and will also introduce some new creative work. The book’s editors argue that more diverse and dynamic accounts of this complex topic offer a much more accurate account than the simplistic insistence that ‘the science is finished’. But they also conclude that more plural and nuanced stories about climate change will lead to better debate and more convincing action. The evening is chaired by Free Word Executive Director Rose Fenton. This event has been organised by the Mediating Change group (based at the Open University), the Ashden Trust and Free Word.
Dan-hancox. Hipsters. Theater. Podcast. New-York. Stephen Fry's letter to his 16-year-old self | Media. I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter (reproduced in your 1997 autobiography Moab Is My Washpot) that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. Oh, lord love you, Stephen. I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault.
But don't kid yourself. Pornocalypse Now. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” —George Orwell Now that Gitmo is basically kaput and Bush’s war on the future has been replaced with Obama’s strategy for the present, is Orwell’s forewarning still relevant? Or has the real-world manifestation of the Orwellian already reached its peak and entered into decline? Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry. Obviously there are countless events that have shaped the world in the past quarter century, but in terms of timing and impact, none have had such a profound effect on the average G8 20-something as the reshaping of conflict and sexual narratives. History is so, like, over.
“Fuck my pussy doctor!” And so it began. What can policymakers learn from happiness research? In 1978, a trio of psychologists curious about happiness assembled two groups of subjects. In the first were winners of the Illinois state lottery. These men and women had received jackpots of between fifty thousand and a million dollars. In the second group were victims of devastating accidents.
Some had been left paralyzed from the waist down. For the others, paralysis started at the neck. The researchers asked the members of both groups a battery of questions about their lives. When the psychologists tabulated the answers, they found that the lottery group rated winning as a highly positive experience and the accident group ranked victimhood as a negative one. Perhaps, the psychologists hypothesized, people who buy lottery tickets tend to be melancholy to begin with, and this had skewed the results.
The researchers wrote up their findings on the lottery winners and the accident victims in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. What should we do with information like this? Development - Abstract of article: The Culture of Economics. State Fairs. The state fair is a ritual carnival marking the end of summer and gardens and apple orchards and the start of school and higher algebra and the imposition of strict rules and what we in the north call the Long Dark Time. Like gardening, the fair doesn't change all that much. The big wheel whirls and the girls squeal and the bratwursts cook on the little steel rollers and the boys slouch around and keep checking their hair.
It isn't the World's Columbian Exposition, the Aquarian Exposition, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the Exposition Universelle, the Gathering of the Tribes, or the Aspen Institute. It's just us, taking a break from digging potatoes. The Ten Chief Joys of the State Fair are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. LRB · Donald MacKenzie: End-of-the-World Trade. Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months.
I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California.