Tag Archives: culture

Liu Qianping: Fashionable Chinese Grandpa

11 Jan

The Wall Street Journal profiles Liu Qianping, a 72-year-old grandfather who has taken the Internet by storm by modeling clothes:

He owes his star turn to his granddaughter, Lu Ting, a clothier who struggled for months to find a model who could boost her online store without breaking the bank. “He’s just so slender,” Ms. Lu says of her 110-pound grandfather. She notes that he looks great in crimson dresses and credits him for more than quadrupling her sales in recent weeks.

Mr. Liu’s ascent in the modeling realm speaks volumes about shifting cultural mores in a fast-aging society. The waif of a man, who goes about in a three-piece suit and a bow-tie when he isn’t clad in pink satin, is among a cadre of Chinese seniors who are all too familiar with cultural upheaval. Their lives have been marked by unimaginable change—from surviving famine to the advent of fast food. Along the way, many have adopted a devil-may-care approach that flies in the face of stereotypes about conservative Asian elders.

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Thank you, Internet, for helping breaking all kinds of stereotypes. Read the entire story here.

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On Israel’s Flourishing Russian Culture

11 Jan

Israel has the third-largest Russian-speaking population outside of Russia, after the United States and Germany. 

The New York Times Lens blog looks into how Russians have assimilated into Israel culture, via photographs by Oled Balilty:

Mr. Balilty’s journey started a year ago, at a large Russian New Year’s Eve celebration. In Israel, most people celebrate the Jewish lunar new year, Rosh Hashana. Mr. Balilty said that he can appreciate continuing one’s culture, as his parents had emigrated from Morocco to Israel.

“The Russians are totally Israeli. They work like everyone else, often in high-tech jobs, but at night they can live in a different world,” Mr. Balilty, 33, said. “They came here with a beautiful culture, but the culture didn’t open to the Israeli people. I hope someday that Israel will be able to fully experience it.”

See the photographs here.

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A Hunger for Tales of Life in the American Cul-de-Sac

11 Dec

The New York Times profiles Nikolai V. Zlobin’s book on American culture. Zlobin is spot-on about many things in American culture:

On Russians raising their children:

In Russia, children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.

Some general scrutiny:

Mr. Zlobin scrutinizes the American practice of interrogating complete strangers about the details of their pregnancies; their weird habit of leaving their curtains open at night, when a Russian would immediately seal himself off from the prying eyes of his neighbors. Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. Why they cannot drink hard liquor. Why they love laws but disdain their leaders.

Interesting bit:

Mr. Zlobin, who has lived in St. Louis, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Washington, finds his answers in middle-class neighborhoods that most Europeans never see. Readers have peppered him with questions about his chapter about life on a cul-de-sac. Most Russians grew up in dense housing blocks, where children ran wild in closed central courtyards. Cul-de-sac translates in Russian as tupik — a word that evokes vulnerability and danger, a dead end with no escape.

But this isn’t exactly correct: there are neighborhoods with true dead ends (they usually have a yellow sign as a warning). This is the literal tupik, not the cul-de-sac. There is no Russian equivalent to the word cul-de-sac, so I disagree with this translation.

Not a boring read.

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Beloit College Mindset List for Class of 2016

21 Aug

Each year since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. Here are some cultural milestones for the class of 2016, who were born in 1994 (the year of the professional baseball strike and the last year for NFL football in Los Angeles):

  1. They should keep their eyes open for Justin Bieber or Dakota Fanning at freshman orientation.
  2. They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of “electronic narcotics.”
  3. The Biblical sources of terms such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The writing on the wall,” “Good Samaritan,” and “The Promised Land” are unknown to most of them.
  4. Michael Jackson’s family, not the Kennedys, constitutes “American Royalty.”
  5. If they miss The Daily Show, they can always get their news on YouTube.
  6. Their lives have been measured in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds.
  7. Robert De Niro is thought of as Greg Focker’s long-suffering father-in-law, not as Vito Corleone or Jimmy Conway.
  8. Bill Clinton is a senior statesman of whose presidency they have little knowledge.
  9. They have never seen an airplane “ticket.”
  10. On TV and in films, the ditzy dumb blonde female generally has been replaced by a couple of Dumb and Dumber males. 
  11. The paradox “too big to fail” has been, for their generation, what “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” was for their grandparents’.
  12. For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world has been a woman’s job in the State Department.
  13. They can’t picture people actually carrying luggage through airports rather than rolling it.
  14. There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles.
  15. Having grown up with MP3s and iPods, they never listen to music on the car radio and really have no use for radio at all.
  16. Since they’ve been born, the United States has measured progress by a 2 percent jump in unemployment and a 16 cent rise in the price of a first class postage stamp.
  17. Benjamin Braddock, having given up both a career in plastics and a relationship with Mrs. Robinson, could be their grandfather.
  18. Their folks have never gazed with pride on a new set of bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf.
  19. The Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap.
  20. Exposed bra straps have always been a fashion statement, not a wardrobe malfunction to be corrected quietly by well-meaning friends.
  21. A significant percentage of them will enter college already displaying some hearing loss.
  22. The Real World has always stopped being polite and started getting real on MTV.
  23. Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles.
  24. White House security has never felt it necessary to wear rubber gloves when gay groups have visited.
  25. They have lived in an era of instant stardom and self-proclaimed celebrities, famous for being famous.
  26. Having made the acquaintance of Furby at an early age, they have expected their toy friends to do ever more unpredictable things.
  27. Outdated icons with images of floppy discs for “save,” a telephone for “phone,” and a snail mail envelope for “mail” have oddly decorated their tablets and smart phone screens.
  28. Star Wars has always been just a film, not a defense strategy.
  29. They have had to incessantly remind their parents not to refer to their CDs and DVDs as “tapes.”
  30. There have always been blue M&Ms, but no tan ones.

See the complete list here. It’s quite fascinating. For comparison purposes, here is Mindset List when I was entering college.

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(via Carpe Diem)

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On Expanding Your Comfort Zone

13 Aug

Derek Sivers writes an inspiring post on how he’s been able to expand his comfort zone over the years:

I’m 40 meters underwater. It’s getting cold and dark. It’s only the third dive in my life, but I’m taking the advanced training course, and the Caribbean teacher was a little reckless, dashing ahead, leaving me alone.

The next day I’m in a government office, answering an interview, raising my right hand, becoming a citizen of Dominica.

I’m in a Muslim Indian family’s house in Staten Island, washing my feet, with the Imam waiting for my conversion ceremony. Next week they will be my family in-law. The Muslim wedding will make her extended family happy. I’ve memorized the syllables I need to say. “Ash hadu alla ilaha illallah. Ash hadu anna muhammadar rasulullah.”

We’re on a rooftop in Rio de Janiero on New Year’s Eve, celebrating with some Brazilians we met the day before. Down below on the beach, a million people are wearing all white.

I’m alone on a bicycle in a forest in Sweden. I left from Stockholm 6 hours ago, headed south, with only 50 Krona, and I’m getting hungry. I don’t know the way back.

We’re in a filthy dorm-room apartment in Guilin, China, studying at the local university. At the local grocery store, we choose from a bin of live frogs.

The India Embassy official hands me a pseudo-passport that says I am now officially a “Person of Indian Origin” – a pseudo-citizen of India.

I’m the back of a truck in Cambodia, soaking wet, hitching a ride back to Phnom Penh after an all day bike ride. The roads were flooded but we rode our bikes through anyway, Mekong River water chest-high.

That week I speak at four conferences in Cambodia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia. By the 4th one, my American accent has started to morph into something kind of Asian.

Derek mentions how some people push themselves physically, but he’s been pushing himself culturally. I want (need!) to improve in both arenas.

Do check out Derek’s question at the bottom of his post and the hundreds of comments people have left in response.

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The Spanish Baby Snatching Phenomenon

19 Jul

This is a very interesting piece in Der Spiegel on the baby snatching phenomenon in Spain:

All of these women share a similar fate. From the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, until well into the 1990s, more than 300,000 children were reportedly taken from their biological parents and passed on to adoptive parents.

In regions captured by the anti-communist Nationalists during the war, doctors and nuns felt it was their patriotic duty to take newborns from “red parents” and give them to other families. There, they were to be raised in accordance with Nationalist and Catholic beliefs.

After the victory of the rebels under General Francisco Franco over the Republicans, the organized theft of babies became a political tool, a way of depriving leftists of their offspring. In 1941, Franco enacted a law that made it permissible to erase evidence of the ancestry of such children by changing their last names.

Most of these stolen children were entrusted to the care of Catholics loyal to the regime. The aim behind this was to rid an entire people of the “Marxist gene,” at least according to the theories of Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, the national psychiatrist of Francoist Spain, that were widespread at the time.

Here is part 2 of the story.

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Tim Cook on the Apple Culture

17 Feb

Earlier this week, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, spoke at a conference put on by Goldman Sachs. For his final question during the the Q&A session, Cook was asked how his leadership might change Apple, and what aspects of the culture he might try to preserve. Here’s what he had to say:

Apple is a unique culture and unique company. You can’t replicate it. I’m not going to witness or permit the slow undoing of it. I believe in it so deeply.

Steve grilled in all of us, over many years, that the company should revolve around great products. We should stay extremely focused on a few things, rather than try to do so many that we did nothing well. We should only go into markets where we can make a significant contribution to society, not just sell a lot of products.

These things, along with keeping excellence as an expectation of everything at Apple. These are the things that I focus on because I think those are the things that make Apple a magical place that really smart people want to work in and do, not just their life’s work, but their life’s best work.

And so we’re always focused on the future. We don’t sit and think about how great things were yesterday. I love that trait because I think it’s the thing that drives us all forward. Those are the things I’m holding onto. It’s a privelege to be a part of it.

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(via Dustin Curtis; full audio here)

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The Largest Biometric System in the World

7 Feb

It has been called “the biggest social project on the planet.”

A major problem in India is that few poor people can prove their identity: they have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address. They live in villages where many share the same name. These people cannot open bank accounts, and no one wants to lend them money. India has no equivalent of Social Security numbering, and just thirty-three million Indians, out of 1.2 billion, pay income tax.

But India’s relatively new program, the unique identity (UID) authority, will enroll approximately 400 million people by the end of this year. The scheme is voluntary, but the poor are enthusiastic about it. This Economist piece has some details, which relies on maintaining a huge database containing biometric information (ten fingerprints and an iris scan) of each of India’s residents:

For the poor, having a secure online identity alters their relationship with the modern world. No more queueing for hours in a distant town and bribing officials with money you don’t have to obtain paperwork that won’t be recognised if you move to another state looking for work. A pilot project just begun in Jharkhand, an eastern state, will link the new identities to individuals’ bank accounts. Those to whom the government owes money will soon be able to receive it electronically, either at a bank or at a village shop. Ghost labourers staffing public-works schemes, and any among India’s 20m government employees, should turn into thin air. The middlemen who steal billions should more easily be bypassed or caught.

That is just the start. Armed with the system, India will be able to rethink the nature of its welfare state, cutting back on benefits in kind and market-distorting subsidies, and turning to cash transfers paid directly into the bank accounts of the neediest. Hundreds of millions of the poor must open bank accounts, which is all to the good, because it will bind them into the modern economy. Care must be taken so mothers rather than feckless fathers control funds for their children. But most poor people, including anyone who wants to move around, will be better off with cash welfare paid in full. Vouchers for medical or education spending could follow.

The scheme based on biometrics is not without criticism, however. Nevertheless, the cost of enrolling each person into this program is about $2, so India’s program could be a model for other poor nations.

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Why French Parents are Superior

6 Feb

Pamela Druckerman is an American mother living in Paris with her British husband and two kids. In her book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, she offers her thoughts on parenting and comparing how French and Americans parents differ in their techniques and temperaments. The Wall Street Journal has a great excerpt, citing why French parents are superior to American parents:

The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

The author’s impression of the way the French perceive American kids and parents:

[M]ost French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of thecadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

One final point, according to the article: when comparing beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important. Being alone forces kids to find creative ways to entertain themselves, an essential skill in deferred gratification.

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See also: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

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The Cult and Culture of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

30 Jan

This is an interesting New York Times piece exploring the cult and culture of Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining:

Three decades on, scholars and fans are still trying to decipher this puzzle of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. To them it’s only ostensibly about an alcoholic father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) going more than stir crazy while his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny, try to cope in an isolated hotel, the Overlook. Mr. Kubrick was famously averse to offering explanations of his films — “I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself,” he once wrote — which has led to a mind-boggling array of theories about just what he was up to.

The hotel’s hedge maze, many Kubrick authorities agree, is a reference to the myth of the Minotaur; others have drawn convincing connections between the Overlook’s well-stocked pantry and the confectionery cottage in Hansel and Gretel. The more one views the film — and many of these scholars admit to viewing it hundreds of times — the more symbols and connections appear. 

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

When Mr. Ascher first began discussing the project with his friend Tim Kirk, who would later become the film’s producer, the two were simply hoping to find enough fans and theories to flesh out a series of short films, maybe something to post on YouTube. “On paper it seems like a very specific niche,” Mr. Ascher said, speaking at the oldest standing Bob’s Big Boy, in Burbank, not far from a campus of the New York Film Academy, where he teaches a class in editing. “The Secret Meanings of ‘The Shining’ — we should be able to wrap that up pretty quick. But the thing kept growing and growing.” By the time the two were done, “Room 237,” which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, was nearly two hours long.

What they had stumbled upon was a subculture of Kubrick fans that has been expanding over the last several years. The group includes professors and historians, fanboys and artists, many of whom have posted their theories online accompanied by maps, videos, and pages-long explications pleading their cases. The Liverpudlian filmmaker Rob Ager’s video analyses of “The Shining” have garnered hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits; the voluminous online essays of Kevin McLeod, a k a “mstrmnd,” range from the film’s marketing materials to its many uses of artificial light.

This is rather peculiar:

The documentary’s biggest leap of faith comes with Jay Weidner, who posits that Mr. Kubrick helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings, then used “The Shining” to both confess his involvement — and brag about it. Mr. Weidner is at work on a DVD about the Kubrick-Apollo connection, his second, and cites as evidence a sweater worn by Danny with “Apollo 11” on it, and the hexagonal design on the hotel hallway carpet pattern, which he argues is a dead ringer for the aerial view of the Apollo launching pad. “The entire substory of ‘The Shining,’ ” Mr. Weidner said in an interview, “is the story of Kubrick making the Apollo footage and then trying to hide it from his wife, and then her finding out about it.”

In case you are wondering, Room 237 is a reference to a haunted room in the hotel, though the NYT piece attests that we still won’t learn what The Shining is after watching the film.

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Related: Wikipedia has an extensive section of The Shining in popular culture.

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