Americans are worried about narcissism. There have been numerous studies that show narcissism on the rise in young people over the past few years. And today, Utne Reader tweeted a pair of articles from their latest issue dealing with the ...Read More
Art--broadly defined as music, painting, literature, movies, theater, and other cultural production--is one of the best means at our disposal to understand ourselves, one another, and the world. And a lot of us go to great lengths to do understand. We read, listen to music, go to the movies. We're picky--we're not satisfied with ideas that are too easy, too trite--but we're not snobs. We just want to keep our eyes wide open and take it all in--the beautiful, the ugly, the goofy, the serious, and everything in between.
Culture is the programming that we're given from the moment we're born, from the time Mommy starts talking to us. Words are given shades of meaning so subtle that we can't even see them until we go out of our way to meet people from other cultures. We backpack and interrail. We take advantage of government programs that let us work and study abroad. We hang out in the "ethnic" neighborhoods in our own city and make an effort to get to know those who think of us as "ethnic." And in so doing, our own inner HTML codes start to become visible.
Weirdness is anything that, after countless attempts to find a logical explanation, we simply can't account for. We're fascinated by weirdness--unsolved mysteries, urban legends, local ghost and monster stories, mind-blowing technology, UFO sightings. We try to be both skeptical and open-minded...after all, we hear all the time about things people said were impossible--teleportation, the building blocks of life on other planets, reincarnation--that, according to scientific research, just might be possible after all.