Behind the camera: How selfies bring authenticity into focus There’s a moment in Eddie Murphy’s legendary 1983 standup special, “Delirious,” when Murphy scans the front row of the crowd and asks if anybody has a camera. A hand reaches up to the stage to offer a quintessential 1980s point-and-shoot, one of those flattened rectangles that masks the photographer’s eyes like a censorship bar. Murphy proceeds to snap two photos of the audience. He then points the camera at himself, drops his arms to his sides, and takes a close-up of his fire-engine red-leather-clad crotch. “Let’s see you explain the last one to the guys at Fotomat,” Murphy jokes as he hands the camera back to its owner. How quaint. Thirty years later, Fotomat kiosks are but a distant memory and the mere question of whether someone in a 3,000-person audience might have a camera is dated to the point of surreality. Most American adults own smartphones, which means a staggering number of people have high-quality cameras with them at any given time. “Dear daily mail, Oh my God, nipple!”
Study: Boyfriends Insecure, Wish to Hoard Success for Themselves - Julie Beck Men felt worse about themselves and the future of their relationships in the face of a female partner’s success. Problem: It’s hard to remember that other peoples’ successes do not diminish your own, to choke down the bile of jealousy that rises in your throat whenever anyone in your peripheral vision is doing a better job of being a person than you are. But you’d think you could swallow the evil green demon that lives inside your unhappy heart long enough to muster up a little genuine pleasure when the person succeeding is your partner, whom you claim to love. Or, at least not let it make you think worse of yourself. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology tested that ability in men and women. Methodology: Researchers studied a total of 896 people in heterosexual relationships over the course of five experiments, testing the theory that men’s implicit self-esteem would be affected more by the success of their partners than women’s would.
Article The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Be uncompromisingly moral. The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. It is an extraordinary gift. But you are a Christian.
How A Wound Heals Last night’s Oscar ceremony and some of the commentary around the ceremony make the best possible case for why diversity matters. We largely knew what to expect with host Seth MacFarlane—immature sexist jokes that weren’t quite funny but could be if he tried, just a little. And then of course he offered a racist joke, a homophobic joke, a fat joke or two (the Rex Reed joke had a little something to it). This is what MacFarlane does and he’s been very successful. The ceremony was what it was and MacFarlane is who he is. And then, there was a tweet from The Onion, referring to nine-year old Quvenzhané Wallis as a c-word. I do believe the person responsible for The Onion tweet in question would have made that tasteless joke about any nine-year old actress. People often fail to understand the importance of diversity. I’m not outraged about this one tweet. Or I’m outraged because I was twelve the first time I was called a cunt and I didn’t even know what the word meant.
When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. Martin Luther King, Jr. If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.1 Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students. Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. Policies and practices that are based on distrust of teachers and disrespect for them will fail. To read more articles by Henry A. . . .
Why Seth MacFarlane and The Onion's Jokes About Quvenzhané Wallis Are So Gross By Alyssa Rosenberg "Why Seth MacFarlane and The Onion’s Jokes About Quvenzhané Wallis Are So Gross" Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them. Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
How the GOP Slowly Went Insane - Jon Lovett The current moment in politics came about slowly, not suddenly, but it doesn't make it any less of a national emergency. When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber and he used to be black but he made himself white and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko. After all, as a kid, you know you are changing, but the world seems static. This is what I was thinking about, anyway, when Michael Jackson died: not what he meant to me but what he became to us. We made it a joke because it became normal. Yes, there are two types of public insanity. But then there is the more insidious crazy. The same happens in our politics. These are events that stop us in our tracks. There are more serious examples we can argue about. And then the government shuts down. It happened slowly, didn’t it? Then it all changed. So the tiger ate its master and now here we are.
Why Seth MacFarlane Bombed The Oscars—And What It Says About Hollywood By Alyssa Rosenberg "Why Seth MacFarlane Bombed The Oscars—And What It Says About Hollywood" Seth MacFarlane’s performance as an Oscar host last night was a perfect advertisement for MacFarlane’s brand of humor. He opened with a number about the fact that he—and we as audiences—have seen female Academy Award nominees’ breasts. It was a bit that could have been a perceptive riff about the fact that women are asked to get naked, and to get naked in different ways, than their male counterparts, and could have tweaked the 77 percent of Academy voters who are men for voting for those roles, rather than recognizing female actors for performances that are non-sexual. Instead, he went in an entirely different direction that made for a faster, but not nearly as deep joke, bringing in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. From there, MacFarlane dug in as hard as he could have on one of the few comedic lanes he’s capable of working in.
No Ultimate Political Solutions | Capital Commentary By Timothy Sherratt October 18, 2013 “The land of the free...because of the brave.” Even the uncertain calligraphy on the homemade sign along the roadside lent that lapidary truth a certain dignity. On a bright fall day of breathtaking colors, the highway from Grand Junction, CO going south passes through one All-America City award winner after another, from the farming towns of Delta and Montrose to the old mining town of Ouray, and over the passes to Silverton and Durango. But all is not well in this corner of the Rocky Mountains. Constitutional checks and balances have always promised to secure minority interests against majority power. Despite the last minute deal to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, the die has been cast. It may be that some of the structural causes of polarized politics could be successfully tackled. But the problems lie deeper than the rules governing elections. The partial remedy I have in mind is this.