Links

The Making of OutKast’s Aquemini | Creative Loafing Atlanta

~ Mark

Andre 3000:

When you rap and say anything kinda conscious, all the conscious people approach you. So after ATLiens I got it all – from books on sex to [metaphysics] and religion. But you also get introduced to a lot of fake phony ass people, and I addressed it in the song. You find some of the fakest people with dreads pouring oils on you. And it’s really kind of mind-blowing when you’re a young person and you start to find out some of this is bullshit, so then you’re just out there searching.

(via)

The Making of OutKast’s Aquemini | Creative Loafing Atlanta

Country Music, Openness to Experience, and the Psychology of Culture War | Big Think

~ Mark

What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?

(via)

Country Music, Openness to Experience, and the Psychology of Culture War | Big Think

How external cues make us overeat.

~ Mark

Why not make the fruit bowl more visible? Put your fruit on the table and not in the refrigerator bin. People say, “That’s okay because I have self-control.” Why not give your self-control a break?

Excellent interview about various findings from research on eating habits. External cues, exercise, perceptions, norming, status, mindfulness, and more generally, over-confidence.

How external cues make us overeat.

Bruce Schneier on Trust | FiveBooks | The Browser

~ Mark

Self-deception makes us better at deception. For example, there is value in my being able to deceive you into thinking I am stronger than I really am. You’re less likely to pick a fight with me, I’m more likely to win a dominance struggle without fighting, and so on. I am better able to bluff you if I actually believe I am stronger than I really am. So we deceive ourselves in order to be better able to deceive others.

Filed under: delusions.

Bruce Schneier on Trust | FiveBooks | The Browser

G&G Me With a Buccellati Silver Spoon! The OA Editor Takes Down the Competition :: Oxford American

~ Mark

An extended, worthwhile critique/rant on Garden & Gun. OA Editor Marc Smirnoff talks a bit about willful editorial blind spots, like G&G’s intentional avoidance of politics, religion, and football. And race:

The South’s progress since 1966 is what needs to be celebrated, not the fact that a native magazine ignored the historic issues and deep struggles of the era. The growth in consciousness wasn’t a pretty process—wasn’t pretty enough for the pages of Southern Living—and it wasn’t even a process that all wanted. But nothing, in the end, has made the South more “civilized” and “gracious” than that growth.

(via)

G&G Me With a Buccellati Silver Spoon! The OA Editor Takes Down the Competition :: Oxford American

Upping the Antihero – The New Inquiry

~ Mark

The old cop who chafed at institutional limits has undergone a neoliberal transformation: The result is a new kind of series that we might call the consultant procedural. A derivative of the cop and private investigator procedurals, the consultant procedural starts with some sort of institutional disqualification and follows the central character as he or she ports unmatched professional skills from job to job.

The consultant procedural! This is brilliant.

Upping the Antihero – The New Inquiry

Gilbert Arenas, Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the argument for signing Agent Zero – Grantland

~ Mark

Kobe’s relentlessness has always been his most celebrated quality, but this season, he’s starting to remind me of one of those space probes that somehow keep feeding back data even after they’ve gone out twice as far as the zone where they were supposed to break down. You know these stories — no one at NASA can believe it, every day they come into work expecting the line to be dead, but somehow, the beeps and blorps keep coming through. Maybe half the transmissions get lost these days, or break up around the moons of Jupiter, but somehow, this piece of isolated metal keeps functioning on a cold fringe of the solar system that no human eyes have seen.

That’s Kobe, right? While the rest of the Lakers look increasingly anxious and time-bound, he just keeps gliding farther out, like some kind of experiment to see whether never having a single feeling can make you immortal. He’s barely preserving radio contact with anyone else at this point, but basketball scientists who’ve seen fragments of his diagnostic readouts report that the numbers are heartening. It’s bizarre.

Gilbert Arenas, Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the argument for signing Agent Zero – Grantland

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

~ Mark

I missed this interview last fall. Murphy on the selectiveness that wealth affords:

I only want to do what I really want to do, otherwise I’m content to sit here and play my guitar all day. I always tell people now that I’m a semiretired gentleman of leisure, and occasionally I’ll go do some work to break the boredom up.

On parenting:

That stuff, with people disciplining their kids back in the day, it’s totally different. You hear about Joe Jackson, who had, what, 10 kids? You’re whipping somebody’s ass if you have 10 kids, in this little house! Ten kids, one of them is spinning all around and walking backward and shit? You’d be like, “Somebody’s getting their ass whipped” [laughs]. It’s a whole different time.

On transience:

Technology has it to where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns into dust, everything is temporary. No matter what you do, if you’re around here long enough, you’ll wind up dribbling and shitting on yourself, and you won’t even remember the shit you did.

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

Envisioning a Post-Campus America – Megan McArdle – The Atlantic

~ Mark

Tenured academics has worked a great scam. They’ve managed to monetize peoples’ affection for regional football teams, and their desire for a work credential, and then somehow diverted that money into paying academics to work on whatever they want, for the rest of their lives, without any oversight by the football fans or the employers.

In addition to enjoying this nice little zinger, definitely read her 12 hypotheses about the college system in the wake of distance-learning disruption. Good stuff.

Envisioning a Post-Campus America – Megan McArdle – The Atlantic