Misc things

[oursin]

I am not encouraged to read the actual book, but this is amazing BURN:

beneath the carapace of difficult writing and literary allusion, there’s the gratifying gooey centre of a blockbuster PG western, with limited nudity, violent scenes and oddly simple moral choices.

Am now wondering how many pretentiously lit'ry tomes there are of which this could be said....

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I was thinking that surely there is a class factor involved here, i.e. parents who can actually afford to be this over-involved in their offspring? When Helicopter Parents Touch Down—At College. Okay, am of generation which is quite aghast at this - I bopped off to New York for a summer during my uni years when making a phone call would have been prohibitively expensive.

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Like I am always going on, 'exotic' ingredients have a long history in global circulation, c.f. lates from the Recipes Project: Globalising Early Modern Recipes

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This is amazing and fascinating: The most widely used writing system in pre-colonial Africa was the ʿAjamī script - so widespread.

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Lost grave of daughter of Black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano found by A-level student:

Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, escaped enslavement to become a celebrated author and campaigner in Georgian England. His memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was a bestseller.
His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe at a time when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.

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Myths about people debunked:

‘Heroic actions are a natural tendency’: why bystander apathy is a myth Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help

Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Yes, to my eye, definite class factor in US helicopter parenting, and the writer is an administrator at a pay-to-attend selective US private school. What struck me about that headline is that "helicopter parents" as a concept is already a generation-plus old. Millennials themselves were bashed for being overprotected, almost smothered, when they began at uni, and their leading edge is early forties already.

It's really fine that the media tend to overlook gen X for blame--and in what I've seen so far, my generation is less likely to bust out these blaming screeds, whereas boomer-aged journalists have adored (for years) to point fingers. It would've been a more interesting essay to investigate why people hover so. (It's not because of technology!)

[landofnowhere]

Yes, definitely a class thing; anyone who's paying to read the Atlantic is automatically upper-middle class at least, and they aim their articles accordingly. Of course, the expectation that children will go to college far away from home is also a class thing.

[landofnowhere]

(Another thought: in the crazy US higher education system, if your kids attend a flagship public university that balances its budget by charging high tuition to out-of-state students, it's possible to save a large chunk of money by moving to the state where your kids attend college. My aunt did this with her two younger boys.)

[oursin]

Apparently in UK there is trend towards applying to local or at least commutable unis and living at home because of COST.

Sigh.

[landofnowhere]

My impression is that this was already common in Canada for people who live in major cities. I don't know what it's like in other countries. (Also, comparing the US to the UK, it's easier to get far away from your family if you want to, because the country is bigger.)

[oursin]

It may seem smaller, but there are still possibilities of getting away because of perceptions of distance in context (and also, transport systems....)

[bibliofile]

> a class thing; anyone who's paying to read the Atlantic is automatically upper-middle class at least, and they aim their articles accordingly

I would agree that that may explain the Atlantic editors' aspirations. I would push back against any claim that the only people paying to read the Atlantic are any one particular class. Please try to avoid the same silly snobbery as those editors.

[landofnowhere]

You're right; I'm sorry.

[adawritesfic]

re the BURN haha my friend somehow made her way through House of Leaves and her epithet for Mark Danielewski is pretentious film-school bro

There's a remix of Poe's Hey Pretty that ruins the song by layering on her brother's terrible prose 0/10 do not recommend

Also, hi! I found you on my Network page and also we used to be connected on LJ (different username) two decades ago.

[oursin]

'pretentious film-school bro' is definitely a thing!

Hi! twenty years, eh?

[adawritesfic]

Yes, I was oyceter's friend fannishly - but all grown up now!

[shewhostaples]

That was my church when we lived in Cambridge. There's a memorial on the church wall, and we marked Anna Maria Vassa's death annually, but it's lovely to have found her grace too.

[silveradept]

It is heartening to hear that research bears out that people work together in crises, rather than passively watching or otherwise being paralyzed by fear or some other situation. (Individual responses may vary, of course, but the trend line toward cooperative is encouraging, and I would like to believe, evolutionary.)

How aggravating it must be to have discovered and brought to light the fraud of something...and to know that it might be decades before public understanding of the thing shifts to the accurate one instead of the inaccurate, but more easily-remembered one.

As for those parents that seem determined to follow and manage the lives of their children even past the point of adulthood or moving off to university days, I must wonder how much of that is the parent(s) having invested their identity so thoroughly in ensuring as smooth a ride for the child in life that they do not wish to confront the possibility that their role needs to have already wound down so that the new adult can go forward.

[lokifan]

WOW re: When Prophecy Fails!!!