Posts Tagged ‘television’
“We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh”*…
Emily Herring on Henri Bergson and the importance of laughter…
… Before Bergson, few philosophers had given laughter much thought. The pre-Socratic thinker Democritus was nicknamed the ‘laughing philosopher’ for espousing cheerfulness as a way of life. However, we know more about his thoughts on atomism than on laughter. Similarly, the section of Aristotle’s Poetics that dealt with comedy hasn’t come down to us. Other major thinkers who have offered passing, often humourless, reflections about humour include Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, who believed that we laugh because we feel superior; Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer who argued that comedy stems from a sense of incongruity; and Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud who suggested that comedians provide a form of much-needed relief (from, respectively, ‘nervous energy’ and repressed emotions). Bergson was unconvinced by these accounts. He believed that the problem of laughter deserved more than a few well-worded digressions. Although his theory retained elements of the incongruity and superiority theories of humour, it also opened entirely new perspectives on the problem…
… Why did a philosopher of such renown deviate from his more traditional and serious philosophical obsessions – the nature of time, memory, perception, free will and the mind-body problem – to focus on the apparently frivolous case-studies of slapstick, vaudeville and word play? And what was there to be gained from such analysis? The topic was a ticklish one. Laughter, wrote Bergson, had ‘a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation’. It was almost as though there was something unnatural about subjecting one of the most pleasurable and ubiquitous human experiences to dry philosophical speculation…
… He believed that laughter should be studied as ‘a living thing’ and treated ‘with the respect due to life’. His investigation was therefore more like that of a field zoologist observing frogs in the wild:
we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition … We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.
Like all good metaphorical field zoologists, Bergson started his study by familiarising himself with his metaphorical frog’s natural habitat: in other words, the conditions under which laughter is most likely to appear and thrive. Following this method, Bergson arrived at three general observations.
The first one, according to Bergson, was so ‘important’ and ‘simple’ that he was surprised it hadn’t attracted more attention from philosophers: ‘The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.’ When Bergson wrote these words, he couldn’t have foreseen that, a century later, through the power of the internet, one of the most popular forms of comedy would be provided by our own pets in the form of viral videos, memes and gifs. But, in a way, he anticipated it in what he wrote about laughter directed at non-humans:
You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression…
… Bergson’s second observation might appear counterintuitive to anyone who has been reduced to tears by a fit of uncontrollable giggles: ‘Laughter has no greater foe than emotion.’ But his point was that certain emotional states – pity, melancholy, rage, fear, etc – make it difficult for us to find the humour in things we might otherwise have laughed at (even anthropomorphic vegetables). We instinctively know that there are situations in which it is best to refrain from laughing. Those who choose to ignore these unspoken rules are immediately sanctioned…
… This is not to say that it’s impossible to laugh in times of hardship. In many cases, humour appears to serve as a coping mechanism in the face of tragedy or misfortune. In 1999, as he was being carried out of his house on a stretcher after a crazed fan stabbed him, the former Beatle George Harrison asked a newly hired employee: ‘So what do you think of the job so far?’ On his death bed, Voltaire allegedly told a priest who was exhorting him to renounce Satan: ‘This is no time for making new enemies.’ Following Bergson’s logic, perhaps in some cases humour is cathartic precisely because it forces us to look at things from a detached perspective.
Finally, laughter ‘appears to stand in need of an echo’, according to Bergson. Evolutionary theorists have hypothesised about the adaptive value of laughter, in particular in the context of social bonding. Laughter might have emerged as a prelinguistic signal of safety or belonging within a group. Laughter and humour continue to play an important role in our various social groups. Most countries, regions and cities share a wide repertoire of jokes at the expense of their neighbours. For example, this Belgian dig at my compatriots, the French: ‘After God created France, he thought it was the most beautiful country in the world. People were going to get jealous, so to make things fair he decided to create the French.’
Jokes need not be nationalistic or even derogatory in nature to facilitate social bonding. Most friends share ‘in-jokes’ that are meant to be understood only within the context of their particular social group, as do certain communities brought together by a football team, political opinions or shared specialist knowledge (‘Why are obtuse angles so depressed? Because they’re never right’). Our laughter ‘is always the laughter of a group’, as Bergson put it. Even in those cases when we are effectively laughing alone, to, or perhaps at ourselves, laughter always presupposes an imagined audience or community.
Bergson’s observations tell us where to find laughter, under which conditions it is possible for laughter to emerge, but they don’t tell us why we laugh. They do nonetheless provide us with important clues. It is no accident that we laugh exclusively at other humans, and that laughter is a communal experience: its purpose, or ‘function’, wrote Bergson, is social. In addition, it isn’t by chance that laughter requires a temporary shutdown of our emotions: though pleasurable, laughter is above all punitive. But what, or whom, is laughter punishing, and how does it do that?
Read on to find out how Bergson reached his conclusion that laughter solves a serious human conundrum– how to keep our minds and social lives elastic: “Laughter Is Vital,” from @emilyherring.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
For those finding it difficult to laugh in these troubled times, see this piece on the pessimisitic Schopenhauer‘s conoisseurship of very distinctive kinds of happiness: “The semi-satisfied life.”
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As we chortle, we might send smiling birthday greetings to Ramón Valdés; he was born on this date in 1924. An actor and comedian, he is best known for the character he made iconic: “Don Ramón” in El Chavo del Ocho, a hugely-successful Mexican sitcom that aired for 8 seasons (31 episodes) across Latin America and in Spain.
“The call is coming from inside the house”*…
As the old proverb goes, “we become what we hate.” In this post, two examples of groups adopting practices they had decried in their enemies.
First, from the fetid ocean of political finance: it’s been pretty obvious for some time that the Trump Administration and the Republican party at large have embraced the doctrine of “honest graft” (and here and here and…). What is perhaps less obvious is the extent to which that impulse has affected (infected?) their approach to campaign finance per se (and here).
But, as Stanford professor Adam Bonica demonstrates, greed is an equal opportunity vice…
The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.
The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.
We all have that one obscure skill we’ve inadvertently maxed out. Mine happens to be navigating the labyrinth of campaign finance data. So, after documenting the spam tactics in a previous article, I told myself I’d just take a quick look to see who was behind them and where the money was going.
That “quick look” immediately pulled me in. The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. During their tenure at the DCCC, they helped pioneer the fundraising model that now dominates Democratic inboxes—a high-volume strategy that relies on emotionally charged, often hyperbolic appeals to compel immediate donations. This model, sometimes called “churn and burn,” prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term donor relationships.
After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party’s most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.
They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.
The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.
The core defense of these aggressive fundraising tactics rests on a single claim: they are brutally effective. The FEC data proves this is a fallacy. An examination of the money flowing through the Mothership network reveals a system designed not for political impact, but for enriching the consultants who operate it.
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm’s other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined…
… After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
But here’s the number that should end all debate:
This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns…
For all of the details, and an explanation of why the Party looks the other way: “The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine,” from @adambonica.bsky.social.
Second, consider the case of Texas, a state that used to hate lawsuits, the nanny state, and the film industry. As Christopher Hooks reports, it’s learned from the Golden State to embrace all three as a means of cultural influence. After unpacking the state government’s turnabout from tort reform to encouaging rise of private enforcement of laws through fines and lawsuits and it’s shift from it’s prior rejection of government nutritional and health guidelines, Hooks looks at Texas’ new push to become a seat of film and television production…
… Beneath the long-standing contempt for California and its tyranny was, apparently, a fair bit of envy. On no issue was this more obvious than the expensive package of film incentives the Lege passed this year—$300 million to refund movie and TV productions for money spent in the state.
Most lawmakers who supported the package doubtless did so because of a general positive feeling about the arts, or just because Matthew McConaughey came to the Capitol to lobby for it. But implicit in the way some lawmakers talk about the baleful influence of the California-centered movie industry—currently in a state of near collapse because of AI and the streaming revolution—is a belief that it represents a malign channel of cultural control and coercion by liberal Hollywood elites. In writing the incentives, Texas lawmakers seemed to be asking: What if we had that power instead?
Texas is likely to attract many additional TV and film shoots with this new money. Some productions will come specifically to take advantage of the bill’s Texas Heritage Project funding, a pot of money set aside and controlled by the governor’s appointees to fund projects that promote “family values” and portray “Texas and Texans in a positive fashion.” A cynic might blink twice and wonder if the governor just gave himself a propaganda fund.
The subtext of the bill is probably more important. The state has already in the recent past revoked film incentives from a movie, 2010’s Machete, because state officials disapproved of its message. Future films made here will likely aim to avoid the watchful eye of state lawmakers. The Legislature seems to be embodying the favorite idea of a profoundly influential Californian, Andrew Breitbart, who reminded conservatives at every possible opportunity that “politics is downstream from culture.” It’s perhaps true, but it’s also the kind of thing you think up when you’ve lived in Santa Monica for too long.
After ten years of a governor who has vowed to keep West Coast ways from our pleasant shores, the state is awash in tech exiles. Big money and a strong executive dominate the Legislature more than ever before. Republicans in the House have turned into granola-eating health food obsessives while trial lawyers are on the ascent. The lieutenant governor spends his days entertaining movie stars. Close your eyes, and you can almost imagine you’re U-Hauling down the 405…
Becoming your enemy: “Right-Wing Lawmakers Are Trying to California Your Texas,” from @hooks.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
Yet another bizzaro flip: “Welcome to the age of Hard Tech” from @taylorlorenz.bsky.social.
* from When a Stranger Calls
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As we try to appreciate the ironies, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008, that a tour bus belonging to the Dave Matthews Band dumped an estimated 800 pounds (360 kg) of human waste from the bus’s blackwater tank through (grated surface of) the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago onto an open-top passenger sightseeing boat sailing in the Chicago River below. Roughly two-thirds of the 120 passengers aboard the tour boat were soaked.
More here.
“We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don’t get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much”*…
Your correspondent is off again– back on March 13… and then (for all your sins) around for a while…
The Media Power Collaborative (a project of Free Press) compares local news to public goods like safe roads and public education and argues that it needs– and deserves– public funding. But those funds need to support authentic local journalism, not the zombiefied private equity-mined operations currently passing for “local news.” Sarah Scire reports…
What would a local media system that prioritizes working and middle classes over corporate profits and the interests of billionaires look like? A new public policy agenda released this week has some ideas.
The Media Power Collaborative, which released its policy framework on Tuesday, describes itself as an organizing space for media workers and their allies in research, activism, and education. The collaborative grew out of a peer networking group — now known as the News Futures collective — and is part of the media reform group Free Press. If you remember the much-discussed Roadmap for Local News that argued that the future of local news is “civic information,” this is the same crowd.
The local news industry, as Nieman Lab readers well know, has been devastated by ad revenue losses, layoffs, and profit-driven corporate ownership over the past couple of decades. Over that time, local newspapers have shrunk faster than a new crop of local news sites and nonprofit newsrooms have been able to grow. Through the policy agenda, policy tracker, and a new network of regional coalitions, the Media Power Collaborative wants to push the public policy conversation toward support for some of the more community-minded local media that’s emerged to fill that gap…
… The Media Power Collaborative agenda highlights local news and information as a public good that deserves “robust public funding” whether it comes from a legacy newsroom or not. From the report:
Just like safe roads and strong public-education systems, public-service journalism and civic information are public goods that benefit entire communities. Unfortunately, the market is critically underproducing these public goods: Estimates of what it would cost annually to bridge current community-information gaps range from $1 billion to $10 billion or more. Even with promising new philanthropic investments in local news and civic media, public funding is essential to addressing a deficit of this magnitude and building toward a community-centered local-news system.
The agenda also reflects a widespread frustration with public policy proposals that would benefit legacy newspaper chain owners such as Alden Global Capital. This has been a consistent theme for civic information advocates though by no means limited to them.
“Corporate media and hedge funds and broadcasters — these are folks who have the ears of lawmakers. They have resources to lobby. And so every starting place in the conversations about media policy is something that protects their interests,” Rispoli said. “A bit of it is saying this [civic media] part of the field deserves a seat at the table. But a bit of it is saying we should be the ones setting the table.”…
… The agenda attempts to address some of the biggest questions in local news policy, including how to protect editorial independence; which local news orgs should qualify for assistance; and, given finite public funding, which communities should be prioritized. Limiting public funds to legacy news organizations does not address their history of underserving communities of color as well as rural and low-income groups. It seems more likely to reinforce existing news deserts and information gaps. Candice Fortman, a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford and former executive director of Outlier Media, was one of the 10 members that met over the course of 2024 to craft the public policy agenda.
“Many minds are working to build the agenda for the future of local news and how we will protect and fund reporting,” Fortman said. “This initiative, however, is about more than just saving local news; it’s about rebuilding it in a way that is equitable, sustainable, and deeply rooted in community needs.”…
[Scire recounts the elements of the Media Power Collaborative’s agenda (which is resonant with the thinking that led to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967)…
… No one is saying any of this will be easy. Those estimates for closing the local news gap are enormous and it’s unlikely public funding alone is the answer. There are also important and fair questions about editorial independence and giving anyone — never mind the government — the power to decide which journalists and news organizations will receive taxpayer dollars.
Perhaps more pressingly, though, is that although majorities of both Democrats and Republicans approve of local media, the political polarization and harsh rhetoric at the national level has trickled down to state and local policy conversations. Funding for public media — already lower in the U.S. than in many other democracies — is under threat. Even paid news subscriptions for government workers have been criticized and exploited for political purposes in recent weeks. Federal legislation seems off the table for now, and we’ll have to see how many states and cities will see proposals to support local news become law.
I noted one other ominous sign. The Media Power Collaborative’s policy agenda mentions that research tells us low-income communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, and rural communities are the most underserved by our current local media system. The report includes a link to research published by the FCC. The report, which was live in late December, now shows a “page not found” error message…
On a possiblle future for local journalism: “A new public policy agenda has a vision for ‘local news for the people’,” from @sarahscire.com and @niemanlab.org.
See also: “America Needs a Working-Class Media” from @columjournreview.bsky.social (source of the image above)
* Jane Smiley
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As we pay attention, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 Edward R. Murrow and his CBS news program, See It Now, examined Senator Joseph McCarthy’s record and anti-communist methods, now widely understood to have been a witch-hunt.
The program is often remembered for these words:
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’
Good night, and good luck.”
It is often referred to as “television’s finest hour.”
(One notes that McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, went on to become a Mafia lawyer (before being disbarred), a political fixer, and Donald Trump’s mentor.)
“Nature doesn’t feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can’t stick to an algorithm.”*…
Just over 30 years ago, my GBN partner Stewart Brand and I were discussing the then-new web affordance Pointcast, an active screensaver that displayed news and other information tailored to a user’s expressed interests and delivered live over the Internet. It was big news at the time; and while it failed, it prefigured the emergence of the algorithms that today feed “preferences” that we don’t even need (nor for that matter have the opportunity) to articlulate.
The problem, we mused, is that a system like that becomes a trap, one that (by simply satisfying expressed desires) impicitly works against discovery of the altogether new, of the thing we didn’t yet know might interest (or benefit) us. A system like that pulls us more deeply into holes instead of helping us explore broader horizons– it is biased against discovery, against learning (in its broadest sense). Our most important discoveries are often the books somewhere on the library shelp near the one we were seeking, the article in the (old print) newpaper next to the one to which we were intially drawn.
The answer, we imagined, wasn’t to skip such systems altogether; they can play a useful role; rather, it was to introduce a complementary “dial-up randomness”– to create ways to feed ourselves a stream of surprises.
Benj Edwards reports on just such an affordance…
[Recently] a New York-based app developer named Isaac Gemal [here] debuted a new site called WikiTok, where users can vertically swipe through an endless stream of Wikipedia article stubs in a manner similar to the interface for video-sharing app TikTok.
It’s a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.
WikiTok, which works through mobile and desktop browsers, feeds visitors a random list of Wikipedia articles—culled from the Wikipedia API—into a vertically scrolling interface. Despite the name that hearkens to TikTok, there are currently no videos involved. Each entry is accompanied by an image pulled from the corresponding article. If you see something you like, you can tap “Read More,” and the full Wikipedia page on the topic will open in your browser.
For now, the feed is truly random, and Gemal is currently resisting calls to automatically tailor the stream of articles to the user’s interests based on what they express interest in.
“I have had plenty of people message me and even make issues on my GitHub asking for some insane crazy WikiTok algorithm,” Gemal told Ars. “And I had to put my foot down and say something along the lines that we’re already ruled by ruthless, opaque algorithms in our everyday life; why can’t we just have one little corner in the world without them?”
The breadth of topics you’ll encounter on WikiTok is staggering, owing to the wide range of knowledge that Wikipedia covers…
… Gemal posted the code for WikiTok on GitHub, so anyone can modify or contribute to the project. Right now, the web app supports 14 languages, article previews, and article sharing on both desktop and mobile browsers. New features may arrive as contributors add them. It’s based on a tech stack that includes React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and Vite.
And so far, he is sticking to his vision of a free way to enjoy Wikipedia without being tracked and targeted. “I have no grand plans for some sort of insane monetized hyper-calculating TikTok algorithm,” Gemal told us. “It is anti-algorithmic, if anything.”
WikiTok cures boredom in spare moments with wholesome swipe-ups: “Developer creates endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction,” @benjedwards.com in @arstechnica.com.
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As we supersize serendipity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that a remarkably warm and open new neighbor moved into the neighborhood: Misteroger’s Neighborhood premeired nationally on public television stations.
Fred McFeely Rogers was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on March 20, 1928. After earning his bachelor’s degree in music from Rollins College in 1951, he began working for NBC for a short time in New York. In 1953, he began working at the new public television station WQED for the show, The Children’s Corner where he learned that wearing sneakers were a lot quieter on the set than his dress shoes.
In 1961, Rogers moved to Toronto, Ontario to work on a new 15-minute show called Misterogers for CBC Television. In 1966, Rogers went back to WQED to create Misteroger’s Neighborhood.
In 1970, the show was renamed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The series ended again in 1976 but was picked up three years later when Rogers felt as if his work speaking to children wasn’t done. The show continued from 1979 through 2001. Mr. Rogers passed away on February 27, 2003.
In 2011, PBS created an animated “spinoff” of the show called Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood featuring the characters Rogers had created in his “land of make-believe”; and in 2019, Tom Hanks portrayed Rogers in the film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a role that earned him an Oscar nomination.
“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing”*…
Americans are now spending more time alone– mostly at home– than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. While the pandemic certainly enforced some of that isolation; the post-COVID world remains extraordinarily atomized.
In a bracing essay, Derek Thompson, explores the emergence of this wide-spread isolation, unpacking its drivers, enumerating its considerable (personal and civic) costs, musing on the possible impact of AI, and pondering what might lead to a return to sociability…
… “I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam [author of Bowling Alone] told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school…
On how we spend our time and what that yields: “The Anti-Social Century,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com (gift article).
See also: “You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention,” from @chrislhayes.bsky.social (also in @theatlantic.com, also a gift article)
* Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
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As we call a friend, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Alexander Graham Bell placed the first transcontinental phone call, from New York to San Francisco, where the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations were underway and his assistant, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson stood by. Bell repeated his famous first telephonic words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” to which Watson this time replied “It will take me five days to get there now!” Bell’s call officially initiated AT&T’s transcontinental service.
And, on ths date 45 years later, in 1959, The first non-stop transcontinental commercial jet trip was made by an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Los Angeles to New York. The sleek silver plane made the flight in airline official time of 4 hours and 3 minutes, half the usual scheduled time for the prop-driven DC- 7Cs then in regular use on that route.
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