Posts tagged culture
I am a supposed-to-be-Muslim-post-Soviet-westernized-eastern female atheist.
Rena Effendi, photographer, to the New Yorker. The Photographer and the Islamist.
Effendi discusses her cultural anxiety when sent by the New Yorker to photograph Ahmed Khalil Khairallah, an Egyptian politician and hardline Islamist, for a profile in the magazine.
Despite her nerves, she eventually got her shot.
US Life Expectancy by County, 1989 and 2009
Via the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation:
IHME analyzed new mortality data by age, sex, and county for the US from 1989 to 2009. Across US counties, life expectancy in 2009 ranged from 66.1 to 81.6 years for men and 73.5 to 86.0 years for women. From 1989 to 2009, life expectancy for men improved by 4.6 years on average but only by 2.7 years for women. And throughout the country, women were more likely than men to have no progress in life expectancy or to have their lifespans get shorter over time.
In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties. This troubling trend is occurring in 84% of Oklahoma counties, 58% of Tennessee counties, and 33% of Georgia counties.
The gap between women living the longest lives and those living the shortest lives is growing, too. In Collier, Florida, women live 85.8 years on average. In McDowell, West Virginia, they live to be 74.1. That’s an 11.7-year gap. In 1989, the gap was 8.7 years. For men, the gap is larger – 15.5 years – but it has grown by less than a year since 1989. Men live the longest in Marin, California, at 81.6 years. They live the shortest lives on average in Quitman and Tunica, Mississippi, at 66.1.
The range of life expectancies is so broad that in some counties, such as Stearns, Minnesota, lifespans rival some of the places where people live the longest – Japan, Hong Kong, and France – while in other counties, life expectancies are lower than places that spend far less on health care – Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia. Even within states, there are large disparities. Women in Fairfax, Virginia, have among the best life expectancies in the world at 84.1 years, while in Sussex, Virginia, they have among the worst at 75.9 years.
At the same time, the life expectancy gap between black Americans and white Americans is closing. In 1989, black men could expect to live to be 63.8 on average, while white men had an average lifespan of 72.5, a difference of 8.7 years. In 2009, black male life expectancy improved by nearly a decade to 71.2 years, and white male life expectancy improved at a slower rate to 76.7 years, a 5.5-year gap. The gap between black women and white women is even narrower: 3.6 years. Black women on average in 2009 had a life expectancy of 77.9 years, compared to 81.5 years for white women.
Images: Screenshots, Life expectancy by county and sex (US), 1989-2009. Top, 1989. Bottom, 2009. Via IHME.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The FJP wishes all a happy and safe World Press Freedom Day.
In Memoriam: Facts, 360 BCE - 2012 CE
We are saddened to learn about the passing of Facts:
To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.
“It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”
Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as “universal principles that everybody agrees on” or “shared assumptions.”
Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune. After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.
Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies
The Internet: where arguments know no bounds.
As technology writer Mike Elgan writes:
Most people who argue and debate online… commit standard, well-understood logical fallacies.
The problem with this is that debates never go anywhere, and they take forever to get there.
By calling people on their logical fallacies, you can shorten arguments, and everyone can learn from debate.
So enter Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies, a site that teaches us about flaws in reasoning. In particular, the logical fallacy:
A logical fallacy is usually what has happened when someone is wrong about something. It’s a flaw in reasoning. They’re like tricks or illusions of thought, and they’re often very sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people.
In an argument? Simply hit the site and mouse over an icon to see what logical fallacy you’re butting up against. They range from the Slippery Slope to the Texas Sharp Shooter.
Pro Tip: Works for offline arguments as well. Just download the free poster from the site.
Image: Screenshot of a Slippery Slope. Via Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies
Sixty-five years ago today Jackie Robinson integrated Baseball
Read about it at Sports Illustrated.
Archipelago Cinema
One of America’s most nostalgic pastimes is enjoying a revival in Thailand, where moviegoers recently floated to a theater flanked by massive rocks.
Via Architizer:
For the final night of the Film on the Rocks Yao Noi Festival earlier this month, guests were taken by boat to savor a final screening on a floating cinema designed by Beijing-based architect Ole Scheeren. Scheeren’s Archipelago Cinema consisted of a floating screen, cradled between two towering rocks, and a separate raft-like auditorium, together offering a spiritual and vaguely primordial cinematic experience.
And once it has finished showing films, the structure will be remodeled. Made with recycled and reusable materials, the theater will one day function as a stage and playground for community children.
How the Daily Mail Got its Groove On
The Daily Mail is England’s most popular paper and its Web site recently surpassed the New York Times’ as the world’s most visited.
Last week it won nine British Press Awards.
In a longread, the New Yorker explorers England’s media landscape and the Mail’s present, past and future.
Via the New Yorker:
The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Nor is the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its traffic.
The Mail presents itself as the defender of traditional British values, the voice of an overlooked majority whose opinions inconvenience the agendas of metropolitan élites. To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. (“WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD,” a recent headline warned.) A Briton’s view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters. In 2010, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with “The Daily Mail Song,” which, so far, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. “Bring back capital punishment for pedophiles / Photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles / Binge Britain! Single Mums! / Pensioners! Hoodie Scum!” Dan sings. “It’s absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail.” The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers.
Journalists Versus the Rest of America
Forbes’ Jon Burner gives a fun five minute talk comparing US journalists to the population at large in order to figure out if the media really is “out of touch.”
What he discovers is that journalists are “about as poor and badly off in the job market as the rest of America, but in terms of [journalists’] cultural preferences and outlook in other respects you’re very special.”
Bruner writes about his talk over at Forbes.
[W]e tend to think of the information age as something entirely new. In fact, people have been wrestling with information for many centuries. If I was going to say when the information age started, I would probably say the 15th century with the invention of the mechanical clock, which turned time into a measurable flow, and the printing press, which expanded our ability to tap into other kinds of thinking. The information age has been building ever since then.
In an interview with The Browser, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, discusses a number of books that inform his thinking.
The Browser, Nicholas Carr on Impact of the Information Age.
Click through for the interview and Carr’s book recommendations
The Library Journal tumblr is pro cultural whimsy.
FJP: We wouldn’t want it any other way.
Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc. I left [because] I value my sanity.
A Facebook moderator explaining why he quit his job monitoring content on the social network. Via The Daily Telegraph, The dark side of Facebook.
Background: Facebook outsources much of its content moderation around the world. There are privacy concerns, of course, but here’s how it generally works:
Last month, 21-year-old Amine Derkaoui gave an interview to Gawker, an American media outlet. Derkaoui had spent three weeks working in Morocco for oDesk, one of the outsourcing companies used by Facebook. His job, for which he claimed he was paid around $1 an hour, involved moderating photos and posts flagged as unsuitable by other users.
“It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook,” he told The Daily Telegraph this week. “And the job itself was very upsetting – no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day.”
Derkaoui is not exaggerating. An articulate man, he described images of animal abuse, butchered bodies and videos of fights. Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories…
…Of course, not all of the unsuitable material on the site is so graphic. Facebook operates a fascinatingly strict set of guidelines determining what should be deleted. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Male nipples are OK, but naked breastfeeding is not. Photographs of bodily fluids (except semen) are allowed, but not if a human being is also shown. Photoshopped images are fine, but not if they show someone in a negative light.
Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California (who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities).
Free the Network
Via Vice:
[H]ere’s a teaser peak at our latest feature documentary, Free the Network, which looks at how DIY hack-tech is changing the discourse of modern day protests. Our story follows the trials of a pair of college dropouts who head up the Free Network Foundation, a peer-to-peer communications initiative seeking to liberate the global Internet from corporate clutches by building their own decentralized, cooperatively owned, free network, one wifi hotspot at a time.
Via kenyatta:
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) vs Ghost in the Shell (1995)
The FJP (I pronounce that like ‘The Wu’) posted Rob G. Wilson and Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix: The Matrix” earlier today which shows how much of the iconic imagery of The Matrix was created by aping scenes from the classic 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell.
Also, I just posted a photoset about how the classic Fritz Lang film ‘Metropolis’ actually owed it’s signature look to an earlier Russian film, Aelita.
Similarly, the visually striking title sequence to David Fincher’s ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ seems to also owe much to the opening credits of Ghost in the Shell when placed alongside each other in the photoset above.
All of this serves to remake Kirby Ferguson’s point with his ‘Everything is a Remix’ series: while established content IP holders like to treat remix as near piracy, mimicry has always existed (good thing) but without attribution (bad thing), especially among Hollywood’s own practitioners.
So let’s move the ball forward. What if instead of considering any of these examples ‘ripoffs’, we treated this imagery (the framing of a shot, the pace of movement) the same way that hip hop treats samples and beats?
If the imagery is effective in conveying a particular thought or emotion, why not allow that as a building block of ‘content’?
FJP: Agreed. Where do we sign up?
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