LINKS - March 6th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?
By Joshua Hunt, The New York Times
“Criterion’s commitment to film and filmmakers has helped the company, which began in the 1980s by releasing films on VHS and LaserDisc — a precursor to DVDs with the comparatively enormous diameter of 12 inches — to stay relevant and profitable through a series of tech revolutions that have upended the industry. While studios and streaming services chase audiences by producing endless sequels and spinoffs, trying to wring fresh content from old ideas, Criterion has built a brand that audiences trust to lead them — even to the most obscure corners of the film universe. Criterion’s success in marketing beautiful, strange, complex movies is the road not taken by most of Hollywood: a steadfast belief in the value of human creativity and curation over the output of any algorithm.”
Why it's proving difficult to define the official dawn of the Anthropocene
By Richard Fisher, BBC
“The pushback appears to be over the AWG's choice of the mid-20th Century as a beginning: other researchers have argued, for instance, that a methane rise from the first farming could equally serve as a marker, or the uptick in lead pollution from early mining and smelting. Not to mention the massive increase in fossil fuel burning during the Industrial Revolution.”
Why Do So Many Mental Illnesses Overlap?
By Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American
“Put another way, scientists say there exists a propensity to develop any of a range of psychiatric problems. They call this predisposition the general psychopathology factor, or p factor. This shared tendency is not a minor contributor to the extent to which someone develops symptoms of mental illness. In fact, it explains about 40 percent of the risk.”
Folklore is philosophy
By Abigail Tulenko, aeon
“I propose that one avenue forward is to travel backward into childhood – to stories like Ibronka’s. Folklore is an overlooked repository of philosophical thinking from voices outside the traditional canon. As such, it provides a model for new approaches that are directly responsive to the problems facing academic philosophy today. If, like Ibronka, we find ourselves tied to the devil, one way to disentangle ourselves may be to spin a tale.”
Scientists put Jared Diamond’s continental axis hypothesis to the test — here’s what they found
By Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost
“However, the researchers discovered that these environmental barriers do not consistently favor Eurasia over other continents. This finding directly challenges Diamond’s assertion that Eurasia’s geographic orientation provided a unique advantage in the spread of agricultural and other critical innovations.
“Instead, the study indicates that the facilitation of cultural spread by geographical and ecological conditions is a global phenomenon, with no clear bias towards Eurasia. This suggests that while environmental factors do play a role in shaping the transmission of culture, they do not do so in a way that inherently advantages any one continent’s societies over another’s.”