Episode 5: Culture Bubbles
For the Good of the Public | The Morning FivePlay episode
Show notes
Wear is the Love, Episode #5
We chat about Alissa Wilkinson’s “A Syllabus for a new world” and Yair Rosenberg’s “Your Bubble is Not the Culture” in this week’s episode. We also talk about the Buffalo Bills’ divisional game tonight against the Chiefs. Go Bills!!
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Your Bubble is Not the Culture” (The Atlantic)
Because “The deep-seated need to justify one’s own relevance is how we end up with cultural criticism that evaluates art as politics, rather than as art which also has political elements.”
“A Syllabus for a new world” (Vox)
Because “…real hope — not the kind politicians talk about, but the kind that keeps you alive — requires something other than violence and forgetting. To put it in Hannah Arendt’s terms, living well (perhaps living at all) requires amor mundi, or love of the world: the commitment to see the world not as we imagine it to be but as it really is, and to love it anyhow. Truly living means being willing to understand how we got here, and where we could go, to face our anxieties and agree together that mere survival is not sufficient.
Art can give us binoculars to see in both directions.”
“You Quit. I Quit. We All Quit. And It’s Not a Coincidence.” (NYT)
Because “Quitting rates were high in August, September and October. Then, according to Labor Department data, they climbed even further: More than 4.5 million people left their jobs voluntarily in November, a record high in two decades of tracking. Economists explained the numbers by noting that competition for workers led to better pay and benefits, driving some to seek out new opportunities. Psychologists have an additional explanation: Quitting is contagious.”
“Americans Feel Burnt Out — Personally And Politically” (FiveThirtyEight)
Because this is a detailed and comprehensive write-up of all the polling we have on-hand to try and explain why Americans across all political spectrums feel hopeless, embattled, or apathetic towards our politics.
“In Defense of Shame” (Gawker)
Because this is a provocative examination of performative vulnerability, and the expectations that often come with it. “Some combination of social media and reality television has led to a society in which fewer and fewer people seem to understand that self-expression is not unambiguously good. Vulnerability has been commodified, but so has a certain never-apologize mentality, despite the fact that the two are diametrically opposed. In fact, few acts require more vulnerability than admitting you were wrong. It is now widely accepted by many that the more publicly vulnerable you are and the more you over-share, the more you know yourself. Yet there is something much more productive and honest about sitting quietly with your own feelings, digging in before lashing out. Expressing does not necessarily equal processing.” (n.b. there’s some vulgarity in this essay)
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