The weird world of social media celebrity

The world of online social media influencers seems to be wider and more menacing than celebrities covertly shilling, a phenomenon that I wrote about yesterday. People who have not acquired fame elsewhere in other fields can apparently become purely YouTube and Instagram celebrities with a whole lot of passionate fans who follow the minutiae of their adored one’s lives with almost obsessive devotion. I wrote earlier about this phenomenon in China but it is apparently big here in the US too.
[Read more…]

Film review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

I wrote two days ago about how the trailer for this film was so good that it made me want to see it. So I did yesterday. It is definitely a film worth watching though a little different from what I was expecting. The trailer seemed to indicate that it was a comedy, and though there are many very funny moments in it, it is at heart a serious film dealing with important issues.
[Read more…]

The assault on American higher education

If you have been following news about things happening on US university campuses, you might have got the impression that they are hotbeds of indoctrination and intolerance, where radical students have taken them over and are imposing a rigid orthodoxy in speech and thought. This is an image that is being widely promoted by the right-wing as part of their assault on higher education, as this article illustrates.
[Read more…]

Circadian rhythms

This year’s Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine was given to three scientists for their work in understanding the nature of circadian rhythms, the daily pattern of life that we all, animals and plants alike, follow that seems to be governed by the rate of the Earth’s rotation about its axis. This topic has been of interest as far back as the 18th century when astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan found that the leaves of mimosa plants opened at the time of daybreak and closed at night, even when they were kept in the dark all the time, suggesting that there was an internal biological clock that was not triggered entirely by sunlight.
[Read more…]

Being paid to influence others

Businesses have long realized that we are swayed more by the opinions of our friends and neighbors than by advertisements in the media, which is why social media has become so powerful in shaping messages. For some people, this trust apparently also extends to celebrities on social media since their recommendations are also assumed to be disinterested. So a celebrity who recommends something on Twitter is more likely to sway readers than the same celebrity saying the same thing in a commercial. The former is seen as an honest preference while the latter is just an actor reading someone else’s words.
[Read more…]

Taking artistic license too far

When you see drawings for proposed architectural projects, they show an idealized vision with pleasant environs consisting of wide, neatly landscaped streets and pedestrians and dogs walking among minimal traffic. My eye was drawn in today’s local newspaper, the Plain Dealer, to an article about a new condominium project on a street that is very close to the university I used to work at and so I am familiar with the neighborhood.
[Read more…]

Now that’s what I call a trailer

We know that filmmakers put some of the best scenes into their trailers. In fact, when it comes to many action films where character and plot are given short shrift and the focus is on fights and chases, once you’ve seen the trailer, you can pretty much skip the film. But there are some trailers that are so compelling that you know immediately that you want to see the film. One such case is the trailer for the black comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri that was released this past week. It tells you just enough to make you curious for more. It helps that it has two superb actors Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson in the lead roles of the mother of a raped and murdered woman and the local police chief.
[Read more…]

Hipster racism

I tend to skip any news story that has the word ‘hipster’ in the title, thinking that it will deal with some trivial and ephemeral social trend that I am not part of nor wish to be part of and that will have disappeared by the time I learn what it is by the process of news osmosis. What I basically knew about the word ‘hipster’ was that it was used pejoratively against people who tried to differentiate themselves from their peers by adopting some lifestyle that was supposedly ironic and avant garde but could just as easily be described as pretentious.
[Read more…]