Posts Tagged ‘Katherine Hepburn’
“Individuals may form communities, but only institutions can create a nation”*…
Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. Game theorist and social scientist Julien Lie-Panis unpacks the extraordinary phenomenon of human cooperation to explain how– and why– institutions work…
Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel.
The solutions we’ve devised are remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. We create rules. Then we appoint guardians to enforce them. Those who break the rules are punished. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that the Roman poet Juvenal identified nearly 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Fisheries appoint monitors to prevent overfishing – but what if the monitors accept bribes to look the other way? Police officers exist to protect everyone’s property and safety – but who ensures that they don’t abuse their power? Governments collect taxes for public services – but how do we stop officials from diverting the funds to their own accounts?
Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world…
[Lie-Panis explores human cooperation, and examines the ways in which, while it follows the same evolutionary rules as cooperation among other species, humans have expanded the ambit of their coordination. He explains the ways in which institutions depend on “a present-future trade-off,” on its constituents’ patience as it works through problems. And he illustrates the ways in which constituents’ concerns with material security and social capital can generate that patience. He concludes…]
… Institutions can thus be understood as social technologies. We engineer them constantly, often without realising it. When neighbours organise to maintain a shared garden or playground, they appoint a small committee to manage funds and decisions. The arrangement works because it transforms the hard problem of coordinating dozens of contributors into the easier problem of trusting a few visible people who can be praised for diligence or blamed for misuse.
Like any tool, institutions cannot create what isn’t already there; they can only amplify existing cooperative capacity. Institutions rest on the conditions that make cooperation rational: material security and social capital. Where those conditions hold, reputation can work at scale. One layer of accountability supports the next, until cooperation extends far beyond the limits of familiarity. From the same force that binds vampire bats and coral reef fish, we have built cities, markets, and nations. Institutions are how trust is scaled to millions of strangers.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Guarding the Guardians,” from @jliep.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Apposite (albeit a bit orthogonal): “Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings,” from @marco-giancotti.bsky.social.
* Benjamin Disraeli
###
As we get along, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a film poking fun at a plethora of institutions, Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby, premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
“Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity”*…
… but that authenticity can be hard to find…
In 2016, US retailer Target severed ties with textile manufacturer Welspun India after discovering that 750,000 sheets and pillowcases labelled Egyptian cotton were not 100% Egyptian after all.
Egypt has long been known for producing long- and extra-long-staple cotton, a variety of the crop with especially long threads that results in softer and more durable fabric – so products labelled Egyptian typically command a higher price. But the year after the Welspun incident, the Cotton Egypt Association estimated that 90% of global supplies of Egyptian cotton in 2016 were fake.
Egyptian cotton is not the only fabric that has fallen foul of mislabelling in recent years. In 2020, the Global Organic Textile Standard (Gots) said that 20,000 tonnes of Indian cotton had been incorrectly certified as organic – around a sixth of the country’s total production. In 2017, a Vietnamese silk brand admitted that half of its silk actually came from China. And in 2018, several British retailers had to withdraw “faux” fur products that turned out to be the real thing.
From choosing an organic cotton T-shirt to buying trainers made out of recycled plastic bottles, many of us opt to pay more in the hope that our purchase will be better quality, or help people or the planet. However, as the Welspun incident and others have shown, when it comes to textiles, we’re not always getting what we think we’ve paid for…
How can we tell if the clothes in our wardrobes really are what they claim to be? “Why fabric fraud is so easy to hide,” from @BBC_Future.
* Coco Chanel
###
As we root around for the real, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
In re: the stomach on which an army marches…
Best if eaten before January, 2014
Readers may recall the announcement of caffeinated beef jerky as a battlefield snack for peckish soldiers. Now the Pentagon’s developmental chefs are adding another staple: a sandwich that can be served fresh after sitting on the shelf for two years.
Why not? The “freeze-dried dreck” that constitutes most MREs has to last years at a time while supplying hurried soldiers with the energy they need, says Clay Dillow at Popular Science. And most of these air-sealed meals, typically little more than “gummy paste,” are in dire need of an upgrade. Enter “the world’s most cutting edge sandwich.”
“For food to rot, you usually need oxygen and water” to invite in bacteria, says Will Shanklin at Geek.com. “MREs that eliminate water have great shelf life, but horrible taste.” In order to keep these high tech sandwiches flavorful, scientists enlisted the preservation properties of a familiar condiment: jam.
Unlike freeze-dried food, preservatives like jam have high water content, says Shanklin. The high-tech sandwich’s jam-like filling — whether it tastes like PB&J or an Italian-style hoagie — “locks in the moisture,” creating a barrier around the water molecules that bacteria need to survive. A special “packet of iron fillings” is also inserted into the package, which “draws in excess moisture, converts it into rust, and traps it.” As for oxygen? The sandwich is packed tightly and vacuum sealed, like most other MREs.
“I’m a big fan. I love the bread,” one soldier tells BBC News in a TV interview. Another echoes his sentiments: “It’s definitely the best two-year-old sandwich I’ve ever had,” he says, smiling. “Better than a lot of new ones I’ve had, too.”
Read the full story in The Week.
As we reconsider discarding those week-old left-overs in the refrigerator, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that a young white woman brought her fiancee, an African-American doctor, home to meet her parents: Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner opened in theaters across the U.S. The film was groundbreaking in its positive treatment of interracial marriage– which had been illegal in most of the United States, and was still illegal in 17 states, mostly Southern states, up until June 12 of the year of the film’s release, when anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.
The film is also notable its pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn as the parents. It was their ninth– and last– turn as co-stars. Tracy died 17 days after shooting wrapped; Hapburn never saw the finished film, explaining that the memories of Tracy were “just too painful.” The doctor was played by Sidney Poitier; his fiance, by Katharine Houghton, Hepburn’s niece.
You must be logged in to post a comment.