Video from Aeon, adapted from the essay, Dispatches from the Ruins.
Archive for the America Category
Why we Love the Apocalypse
Posted in America, Books, Clips, Culture, Video on May 31, 2017 by frankburesTeaching a Stone to Fly: The World Rock Skipping Championship
Posted in America, Clips, Culture, Outdoors, Science, Travel on May 30, 2017 by frankburesFrom Minnesota Monthly:
Late one afternoon last summer, our family arrived at a campsite on the western shore of Lake Michigan. We had been driving all day, across Wisconsin on our way further east. The four of us—my wife and two daughters, ages 7 and 10—set up our tent, made dinner, then went down to the water. Two-foot waves were rolling across the lake, a taste of what lay ahead: We were going to the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping Competition—the oldest, most prestigious rock-skipping tournament in the United States, if not the world. Every Fourth of July, elite skippers (many former and current world-record holders) take turns throwing their stones into the waters where lakes Huron and Michigan meet, also known for having rolling, two-foot waves crashing on the beach.
I looked down, saw a decent skipping stone, and picked it up. My daughters were watching. The older one spoke up.
“Are you prepared for the fact that you probably won’t win?” she asked.
I threw the stone.
“Four,” she said. “But it caught a wave.”
My shoulders sagged.
“Don’t doubt yourself, Daddy!”
Her younger sister looked at her. “But you doubted him,” she said.
“That’s different.”
Prepared or not, I knew I had a knack for skipping. Some years earlier, I’d been driving through the mountains when I stopped at a roadside lake. The water was smooth as glass. I bent down, picked up a wide, flat stone, and sent it skimming across the water. It went on for what felt like forever, until it finally hit the rocky shore on the other side.
Behind me, a young boy spoke up.
“Wow,” he said. “You must be the world-champion rock skipper.”
I wasn’t. At least not yet. But I’d been skipping stones my whole life, ever since I was around my daughters’ ages, always getting better and better. There was almost nothing I loved better than the feeling of knowing—even before it hit the water—that you had a perfect throw, one that defies nature by making a stone both fly and float.
Mackinac, I had learned, was the place where such things were decided. These were my people—the ones who could spend hours on a beach looking for just the right stone, who would fill bags and boxes with skippers from secret locations, who would throw until their arm gave way, lost in the simple sorcery of stone skipping.
Friday Night Bikes
Posted in America, Bicycling, Clips, Culture, Outdoors on May 10, 2017 by frankburesFrom Bicycling Magazine. Photos by Andy Richter.
“It has been explosive,” says NICA’s executive director, Austin McInerny. “We grew 43 percent from 2015 to 2016. Some of the leagues are seeing more in the 7th- and 8th-grade fields than in the older ones. I’m calling that the tip of the iceberg. I think it could grow even quicker if we found more adults who wanted to step up and run those teams.”
John Emery is the manager of Michael’s Cycles in Chaska, Minnesota, where the local high school team has been doubling in size every year (it’s now up to 40-plus members). “NICA is just bonkers,” he says. “The number of new people getting on bikes for the first time in their lives, it’s just huge. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
And not all of those new riders are kids. “Once the kids get involved, the parents get enthusiastic about mountain biking as well,” says Erik Saltvold, owner of Erik’s Bike, Board, and Ski, which has 24 locations in Wisconsin and Minnesota. “It brings whole families into the sport.”
More photos by Andy Richter here.
Creepy Clowns, Pizzagate and American Panics
Posted in America, Asia, Clips, Culture, Geography of Madness, Science on May 4, 2017 by frankbures
From Powells.com
To a village dweller on Hainan, the Great American Clown Panic of 2016 would certainly seem strange, while the 1985 ghost panic of Hainan would make a certain amount of sense. This was largely because they had heard the stories about genital-stealing ghosts before. Older residents “vividly remembered previous epidemics in 1948, 1955, 1966 and 1974” that had also affected hundreds of people. Our culture is the ecosystem of narratives that we belong to. One study found that the difference between victims and non-victims was 100 percent of victims had prior knowledge of the danger of the fox ghost, and 100 percent of them had a fear of death due to genital retractions. Culture-bound syndromes and mass panics emerge from the stories that we believe could be true.
For the same reason, the clown panic makes a certain kind of sense to us: we have heard this story before. “The story always sounds real,” says Robert Bartholomew, author of Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior and many other books on the topic. “A pedophile or sadist trying to lure people into the woods. Yet when you look into it, these stories go back for centuries. Folklorists have a name for them: bad clown narratives, or killer clown, phantom clown, stalking clown. For me, phantom clowns are the bogeyman in another guise. They are living folklore. They are a modern myth in the making.”
Clowns, in our culture, have a long and complicated history. According to Bartholomew they were viewed positively until the late 1800s, when they began to appear in operas as murderers. Around the Great Depression in 1930, traveling circuses hit hard times, so they spun off into smaller sideshow carnivals. These were called “Dark Carnivals” (like the Ray Bradbury novel of the same name) and there clowns were dark, creepy, and scary.
Q&A with David Grann
Posted in America, Books, Clips, Writers, Writing on April 21, 2017 by frankbures
From Nieman Storyboard:
David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage tribe in early 20th century Oklahoma.
When I learned about these crimes several years ago, I was shocked that, like so many Americans, I had never learned about them in school or read about them in books.
Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker and something of a history writer himself, couldn’t believe that the sinister campaign targeting the oil beneath the Osage reservation land was so little known. So he started looking into the killings.
There wasn’t much online. No one seemed to have told the victims’ story in a comprehensive way, even though, as Grann puts it, the campaign was “one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.
Brand You: Questioning Self-Promotion
Posted in America, Art, Books, Clips, Culture, Writers, Writing on April 4, 2017 by frankbures
From last year in Poets & Writers, now online:
It should be said that writers have always been keen self-promoters, as Tony Perrottet pointed out in a New York Times article: In 440 BCE, Herodotus shilled his Histories to wealthy patrons at the Olympics. In 1887, Guy de Maupassant flew a hot-air balloon featuring the name of his latest short story. Walt Whitman wrote anonymous reviews of his work, declaring, “An American bard at last!”
But at the end of the twentieth century something changed, something deep. In an influential article titled “The Brand Called You,” published by Fast Company in 1997, Tom Peters admonished not just corporations, not just celebrities, but everyone to think of themselves as a brand, to promote themselves as a brand, and to see life and work as an endless branding opportunity.
This has come to pass. Today, it’s accepted that anyone with a pulse and a keyboard can and should promote anything that comes to mind. As a result, most of us are drowning in a promotional tsunami. It can feel like a crushing weight, like social media has become a giant pyramid scheme in which we are all selling some idea of ourselves, even as we struggle to believe our own marketing.
At Arm’s Length
Posted in America, Clips, Culture, Science on March 22, 2017 by frankbures
From The Rotarian:
Some years ago, my wife and I went to the south of Thailand to teach English at an elementary school. It was a poor school in a small town. The principal did his best to accommodate us, building a room for us to live in at the school. It had a bathroom and a shower and many, many photos of the school’s owner. By local standards it was luxurious.
By our standards, however, it was missing one main thing: privacy. A buffer zone between ourselves and everyone else. The room was situated right next to the principal’s office, and our shared wall stopped about a foot short of the ceiling. Our bed sat against one side of this wall. On the other side was the principal’s desk. It felt, in a way, as though we were in bed with him.
This was not the first time I had noticed cultural differences regarding personal space. 
When I lived in East Africa, I saw how my need for space seemed strange and possibly hostile in a very people-oriented culture. But Americans have long been notorious for the vast expanses of personal space we need. An article titled “Understanding American Culture” on the International Student Guide to the USA website advises: “Americans tend to require more personal space than in other cultures. If you try to get too close to an American during your conversation, he or she will feel that you are ‘in their face’ and will try to back away. Try to avoid physical contact while you are speaking, since this may lead to discomfort.”
