Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.
I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.
The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose. So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original). But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.
Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.
You can guess the most important reason!
Some excerpts:
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Oy! But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
14 lines—too much! But we all know the reason: DEVICES!
Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.
Those statistics are depressing.
So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.
Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.
Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”
The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.
The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:
The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”
Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.
. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.
If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.
Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding. All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.
Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).
And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.
For some reason I’ve forgotten to collect and post irritating terms, lists of which used to be fairly common here. I usually proffered at least three, but this week I have two. The purpose here is to get readers to vent about their own annoying words or phrases. And let’s not be Pecksniffs and say “but language evolves”! This is a chance to vent and have fun, not defend the use of annoying terms.
My choices:
Deep dive. This phrase is increasingly used to denote a “hard look” at an issue or topic. I have two issues with this.
First, it’s used because it’s trendy. What’s wrong with “hard look” or “thorough examination”?
Second, very often the “deep dive” is not a thorough look, but a shallow belly flop. Here’s an example from a rag I used to read, the Huffington Post. Click to read:
The article is short, not a “deep dive” at all. Using trendy language like this shows a lack of imagination, a way to demonstrate how cool you are by using the latest argot. You’ll never catch me saying this.
Passed (a synonym for “died”). This word is a double euphemism, for it is itself a synonym for “passed on” or “passed away”, which themselves are synonyms for “died.” What is wrong with “died”? Well, some people can’t bring themselves to say it, even if it’s true.
And there’s one bad side effect: to me, “passed” implies that your journey of life isn’t yet complete: that you’re “passing on” to some other phase of your existence. That is likely to be “heaven”. In other words, to me the phrase denotes belief in an afterlife, and atheists like me have no truck with it. Fortunately, the obituaries in newspaper and magazines don’t use it, and stick with the simple “died.” “Passed” is a word you hear from the mouths of your friends, not in the news.
Now, dear readers, what words or phrases curl the soles of your shoes?
Posting will probably be very light this weekend; Richard Dawkins is coming to town on what he says is his final tour (he’s 83), and I’ll be attending several Dawkins-related events, including his talk tomorrow. It will be at the old and small Chicago Theater, a fantastic venue, and you can still get tickets here. As you see below, the host is Jesse Singal.
Welcome to Friday, September 20, 2024, and National String Cheese Day. I do love the stuff, even though it’s bland as hell, because the texture is everything. But on average every American eats half a pound of this stuff per year. Here’s how they make it (in Wisconsin, of course):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 20 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It looks like Israel is preparing for a war with Hezbollah, and Israel has pretty much said as much. Although the beepers and walkie-talkies that Mossad used to injure a large proportion of Hezbollah fighters this week were apparently detonated prematurely to prevent Hezbollah from detecting them, the war for which they were to be used seems inevitable. Now Israel is flying warplanes over Beirut (article archived here).
Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah called the two days of deadly blasts linked to electronic devices in Lebanon this week an “act of war” by Israel, as the Israeli military stepped up strikes on southern Lebanon, flew warplanes over Beirut and approved plans for the next stage of the conflict along the border between the two countries.
“The enemy transgressed all boundaries and red lines,” Nasrallah said in a widely anticipated speech Thursday evening local time about the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and injured nearly 3,000 when pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices exploded simultaneously on Tuesday and Wednesday across Lebanon. The attacks were “a major assault on Lebanon, its security and sovereignty, a war crime — an act of war,” he added, and they dealt an “unprecedented blow” to Hezbollah and Lebanon.
As he spoke in a televised address, the rumble of planes and large sonic booms could be heard over the Lebanese capital. But Nasrallah also struck a note of defiance, saying the group’s operations would not stop until Israel ended its war in Gaza.
“They will face a severe reckoning and just retribution, whether they expect it or not,” Nasrallah said of Israel. The nature, size and location of any retaliatory attack would be kept secret, he said.
. . . Minutes before Nasrallah began to speak, the Israel Defense Forces announced it was striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon to “degrade Hezbollah’s terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.”
Earlier Thursday, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where support for Hezbollah is strong, residents said they feel vulnerable and exposed, with a sense of unease sweeping across their neighborhoods. The attacks have eroded the once-solid sense of security they felt living far from the front lines in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah has said it won’t stop attacking Israel until it ends the war in Gaza. Fat chance of that happening! And so the Keffiyeh Brigade is deeming the beeper attacks as “war crimes”, which they’re not. (As I’ve said, Hezbollah is committing multiple war crimes every day, firing missiles at Israeli civilian targets multiple times a day. But nobody seems to notice that, least of all the cowardly United Nations, which even passed a binding resolution prohibiting Hezbollah from attacking Israel. And of course there are thousands of UN troops in Lebanon that are supposed to keep the peace, but they’ve been too afraid to stop Hezbollah.) The war with Hezbollah will be a tough one, for they have more and better missiles than did Hamas, Hezbollah is a well-organized group, and they even have tunnels. This also means that Israel may be involved in two wars at once. Can they handle it? Well, they did in 1948, but armaments have changed a lot since then. And the United Nations has proven itself a bunch of hypocrites.
*John McWhorter has written some good columns lately (here’s one I wanted to feature), but I’ve had no space to do so. I do, however, want to call your attention to his new NYT op’ed called “Wby J. D. Vance dropped into my inbox” (archived here). It’s a lament for how McWhorter and Vance started out on similar paths, but then diverged. Vance, it seems, is proving a distinct liability to the Trump ticket, still harping on things like Haitian immigrants eating cats, but at one time McWhorter saw a kinship between them:
I once thought of JD Vance and me as coming from a similar place.
Not in terms of life experience, as my middle-class suburban childhood was quite different from Vance’s early years in rural poverty.
But something similar happened when we each wrote a book.
In 2000, I published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.”
. . . . quite a few people thought I wrote the book as a cudgel for conservative Republicans to take up against Black people. In the Bay Area, where I was teaching, for a while I was race traitor No. 1. Besides occasional insults on the street, local newspapers did nakedly biased profiles of me, laced with nasty comments by people like the writer Ishmael Reed (who as recently as last year had a character in one of his plays dissing me!). I heard endlessly that I must have been hoping to get rich by selling out to white conservatives.
Arguing from the middle means you get it from both ends. I am often a self-hating racist to the left, while the right often thinks I am a conservative in denial and lately diagnose me as suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And so shall it be, as I hold on tight where I sit.
Sixteen years later, Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” became a huge best seller by arguing that what ails poor Appalachians is the result of both structural factors such as deindustrialization and also cultural factors. Structural factors can cause the cultural ones, but the latter can take on a life of their own. He describes people who see themselves solely as victims of those larger forces, rather than doing what is within their power to improve their lives.
Vance came in for it in the same way that I did back in the day. Despite his efforts to thread the needle, more than a few Appalachians read the book as disrespectful, condescending and disloyal. Sarah Jones at The New Republic judged Vance’s main point to be simply “All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did.”
They exchanged friendly emails for a while, and Mcwhorter “assumed that his trajectory would involve walking the same kind of line I have tried to, exploring societal issues without being co-opted by the temptations of partisanship.” It didn’t work out that way:
Instead, Vance has done exactly what my detractors had assumed I would, riding the book to fame and fortune provided by people with partisan and even hostile right-wing opinions. It’s sad and perplexing to watch a person with such potential to do good transparently selling out.
His recent CNN interview with Dana Bash — the one in which he said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do” — was typically dismaying.
. . . And that’s just it — Vance is distinctly uncrazy. He is smart and competent and has proved himself to be capable of sensitive, thoughtful engagement. I just don’t believe that someone like that could fall for the idea that Haitians are netting people’s Goldendoodles, saying grace over a dinner of puppy chops and saving the leftovers for sandwiches the next day.
In other words, McWhorter accuses Vance of knowingly pushing lies to advance a divisive point of view about immigrants. And, it seems, McWhorter is right.
*The NYT has two op-eds aimed at giving Kamala Harris tips on how to win the Presidency. One, by Frank Bruni, is called “Why can’t Kamala Harris just say this?” (archived here), consists of a long explanation that, says Bruni, Harris should give for changing her positions over the last decade. (It doesn’t offer any new positions, which is also one of her problems.) Read it for yourself, and see if it would help her.
The other, by Todd Purdum, identified as “a former White House correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief for The Times” is called “The political cost to Kamala Harris of not answering direct questions.” *Archived here, though they changed the title.) She did this again in her recent interview with Action News’s Brian Taff, answering questions about her specific plans by beginning with “I’ll start with this. .” and then telling an incredibly tedious and aging story about her upbringing, before finally getting around to mentioning a few unworkable and un-pass-able initiatives that she’s mentioned before. Some excerpts, and blame this not on me, but on the NYT, whom, I guess, some readers will accuse of trying to help get Trump elected!:
When Kamala Harris sat down for just the second major television interview of her campaign last week with the Philadelphia ABC affiliate, the anchor asked her to outline “one or two specific things” she would do to fulfill her pledge of “bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people.” She responded by recalling how she was “a middle-class kid” who grew up in a community of construction workers, nurses and teachers who were “very proud of their lawn.” She recounted her mother’s saving to buy her family’s first house. She paid tribute to a neighbor who became a surrogate parent. She praised the “beautiful character” of the American people.
Only then, after nearly two minutes, did Ms. Harris outline her plan for a $50,000 tax credit for start-up small businesses; private-sector tax breaks to spark construction of three million housing units over four years; and $25,000 in federal down payment assistance for first-time home buyers.
It’s a shibboleth of modern political strategy that candidates should answer the questions they want to, not the ones that are asked, and Ms. Harris faces a unique challenge in this truncated presidential race of introducing herself to an electorate that in many ways still barely knows her. So she might be forgiven for leading with a blizzard of atmospheric biographical detail that makes some voters feel they can’t trust her to answer a direct question.
But in a campaign in which Donald Trump fills our days with arrant nonsense and dominates the national discussion (and polls show a tight race where Ms. Harris is running behind Joe Biden’s level of support in 2020 with some groups), the vice president can’t afford to stick only to rehearsed answers and stump speeches that might not persuade voters or shape what America is talking about.
. . . Writing about politicians for decades has convinced me that direct, succinct answers and explanations from Ms. Harris would go a long way — perhaps longer than she realizes — toward persuading voters that they know enough about her and her plans, which polling surveys now suggest they don’t (yet badly want to). Being known as a straight shooter would also help persuade restive political elites, pundits and journalists that Ms. Harris is grappling with such scrutiny, and I think she’s apt to be rewarded in the end for it.
. . . For better or worse, questions — and usually the very hardest ones — come with the job of being president. When voters say they need to know more about Ms. Harris, I think part of what they are really saying is that they want to know more about how she would be as president, as well as what she would do. What would it be like to have her in their living rooms and on their devices for four years? How would she roll with the punches? How would she react in a crisis? How would she respond to their concerns, fears, hopes, dreams, desires — and, yes, criticisms? Listening closely, and answering questions — clearly, early and often — is inevitably a part of passing that test.
Purdum also says, like Bruni, that Harris should “own” her flip-flopping. Don’t blame me for this: I’m highlighting New York Times articles, ones trying to help Harris get elected. Clearly the NYT should shut up until after the election is over, lest they enable Trump by hjighlighting Harris’s deficiencies. The price of her avoidance is losing the election. I think the last paragraph above is quite eloquent—and accurate. So far, undecided voters aren’t going over to Harris’s side, regardless of her slaughtering Trump in the debate. Why? It’s because, like me, they don’t have any idea what Harris would be like as President. (We already know what Trump would be like; we experienced that nightmare.)
The NYT still continues its bias in the news. Here are the top two headlines from the online news. The middle video features mockery of Trump. Oprah??
American travelers can now apply to renew their passports online, saving applicants a trip to the post office and mail service delays.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday that the State Department would be moving its pilot program for online renewals out of testing and into a permanent role.
The agency has been testing the renewal system since 2022. Over time, it has slowly expanded how many online applications it can handle each day. For the system’smid-June relaunch, the public could submit materials starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Once the agency reached capacity, it would close the portal until the next day.
Rena Bitter, assistant secretary for consular affairs, estimates that up to 5 million Americans per year will be able to use the service that is currently available 24/7.
To be eligible for the online system, travelers must be U.S. citizens or residents 25 and older who have already had a passport with 10-year validity, among other requirements. Here are a few. .
The list isn’t onerous, though it says to give them an eight-week period to get your passport to you. I’ve used the renewal system not long ago, and I got my new passport within a week and a half. So if yours is expiring, go here and submit your application (if you pay extra you can get it in 2-3 weeks but I wouldn’t worry too much about that). You’ll need a digital color photo taken against a neutral background, but that’s dead easy these days. The site even has a tool that will crop your photo to the right size. (Don’t expect a great picture on your passport, though!).
*Saturday Night Live debuted on October 11, 1975, and so is beginning its 50th season. The AP looks back at what happened to the cast members of that first season, which I watched with fascination (I’d never seen anything like it!). Two of course are dead: John Belushi and Gilda Radner, but looking back at that cast, and comparing it to what I’ve seen of SNL since then (I no longer stay up that late, but watch what are supposed to be “good” skits), I have to conclude that the first case was the best cast. Here are the members and a few words given on each:
John Belushi: Following years of drug use, he died March 5, 1982, at 33 after overdosing at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Belushi’s death stunned and saddened his friends and fans and symbolized the end of the hard-living ‘70s.
Gilda Radner: Nasally Roseanne Roseannadanna. Weird teen Lisa Loopner. Weekend Update’s “never mind” complainer Emily Litella. Radner contributed an endearing sweetness to the inaugural season of “SNL.” She stayed for five years.
. . . Radner died May 20, 1989, at age 42 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Her book detailing her cancer fight was released earlier that year. A documentary about her life, “Love Gilda,” was released in 2018.
Chevy Chase: Now 80, Chase has taken in recent years to hosting screenings with audience Q&As for “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” the most enduring movie in that franchise. He also makes chicken sounds and posts fan meetups and family gatherings on TikTok, where he has 1.2 million followers.
Laraine Newman: She left “SNL” in 1980 after portraying Connie Conehead, Valley Girl stewardess Sherry and ditzy public access TV co-host Christie Christina. She was also a recurring reporter on “Weekend Update.”
Newman has spoken openly about her struggles with depression and drug addiction during that time. She got sober in 1987.
Dan Akroyd: When he wasn’t bleeding out as Julia Child or declaring, “Jane, you ignorant slut!” on “Weekend Update,” Aykroyd swagged with Steve Martin as one of two wild and crazy guys, and led the Conehead family as patriarch Beldar.
And he lent so much more to “SNL” before leaving in 1979, including as half of The Blues Brothers and impersonations of talk show host Tom Snyder, Rod Serling and two presidents: Nixon and Carter.
Jane Curtin: Curtin left “SNL,” in 1980, after five seasons. She was a master of deadpan, often playing the straight woman off such outsized performers as Belushi and Radner. A regular on “Weekend Update,” she was also known for the Coneheads sketches as matriarch Prymaat and as Enid Loopner with fellow nerds Radner and Murray.
Garrett Morris: Initially hired as a writer, he was the oldest on “SNL’s” first cast at 37. He came to the show after 17 years as a singer and arranger with Harry Belafonte, as an actor in plays and musicals, as a playwright and as a civil rights activist who helped desegregate Actor’s Equity.
. . . He remained on “SNL” until 1980. He was known for his character Chico Escuela, the Dominican baseball player whose catchphrase, “Baseball has been berry berry good to me,” caught on in pop culture. He also performed as the shouting interpreter in the “News for the Hard of Hearing” segments and did impersonations of Idi Amin, James Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bob Marley and Muhammad Ali.
What a cast! Yes, there have been individuals who have been as good as some of these, but not have equaled Belushi and Radner, or, a close second, Dan Akroyd. I’d be remiss if I didn’t show a sketch from the best two, so here you go:
“Samurai Delicatessen” is a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live that aired on January 17, 1976. The sketch features John Belushi as a samurai who makes a sandwich by: Cutting ropes on hanging salami Slicing tomatoes in midair Splitting bread with his skull The sketch also features Buck Henry as Mr. Dantley, who waits while the samurai makes the sandwich. The two characters have a pleasant conversation even though they speak different languages. #snl#johnbelushi#ripjohnbelushi
The hypocrisy is glaring: the same regime that intentionally blinded peaceful ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protesters in Iran is now offering medical care to Hezbollah operatives who lost their eyesight to pager explosions.
From Steve Stewart-Williams. No, journals should not engage in politics nor endorse candidates. It only serves to weaken the public’s confidence in science.
“In 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey finds that viewing the endorsement did not change people’s views of the candidates, but caused some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally.” https://t.co/ujZEpKI5kCpic.twitter.com/yQjMqb7Npv
20 September 1896 | A German Jewish woman, Erna Eschwege, was born in Offenburg.
She arrived at #Auschwitz on 2 June 1944 in a transport of 1,000 Jews deported from #Drancy. After the selection she was murdered in a gas chamber pic.twitter.com/kEEGRodF9E
Matthew calls this pair of tweets “Beautify—and terrifying.”:
This is the first time the Warming Stripes have been displayed at sea. It is vital that the message of the stripes reaches every corner of the globe – our world is warming fast, especially in the Arctic, and we need urgent action to limit the impacts of climate change. pic.twitter.com/ONl6LHKzDo
You must have experienced this frustration: trying to get those stickers off of individual pieces of fruit without ripping the skin. I suppose it can be done with care, but I don’t have the time. Plus they now have ways to emboss the fruit without stickers, like using lasers.
My lunch apple, before:
My lunch apple, after sticker removal. The unavoidable crater appears:
Now clearly this isn’t a cosmic issue, but it’s one Andy Rooney would have talked about, and now that he’s gone somebody has to!
I told you so! Rock reached its apogee in the Sixties and has been going downhill ever since. Today’s popular music for young people is pathetic: autotuned, repetitive, trite, and without much creativity or inventivity. Look at the Billboard Top Ten this week, featuring Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift. Yes, readers send me groups that, they claim, are as good as the Beatles. They often are okay, but they are definitely not as good as the Beatles. Or The Band, or Hendrix, or Clapton, or Joni Mitchell, or Steely Dan, or. . . . ad infinitum.
But don’t take my word for it; I’ve already defended my views extensively. Now SCIENCE itself proves the decline of rock, summarized in the article in the Guardian below, and based in a paper in the respectable journal Nature. You can read both by clicking below:
I’ll simply provide an excerpt of the Guardian article:
You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.
Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.
A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.
Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan – who rose to fame in the 1960s – has won a Nobel prize in literature.
. . . . “What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape – from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.
Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.
For the study in the journal [Nature] Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.
“Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised.
The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.
Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.
The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said – adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.
“Rap music has become more angry than the other genres,” she added.
The researchers also investigated which songs the fans of different genres looked up on the lyric website Genius.
Unlike other genres, rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.
Rock has tumbled down the charts in recent decades, and this could suggest fans are increasingly looking back to the genre’s heyday, rather than its present.
Another way that music has changed is that “the first 10-15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle said.
Previous research has also suggested that people tend to listen to music more in the background these days, she added.
There you go. If self-obsessed, angry, repetitive, and simpler songs are better songs, then you don’t have ears to hear. Further, “rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.”
My prediction is that “oldies” stations will continue to play music of the sixties and early seventies, and you won’t be hearing Ariana Grande even when the kids in Generation Z or Generation Alpha grow up. Yes, people may prefer the tunes of their youth, for that was the musical background for their growing up, but it so happens that my youth happened to coincide with the greatest flowering of rock music. (Purely a coincidence, I assure you.) Like art, classical music, and opera, genres of art tend to wear themselves out and become senescent. Nowhere is this more evident than rock music.
I found the article in Nature Scientific Reports on which the piece above was based. Click to read; I’ll not go through it as it’s long and complicated:
The abstract:
Abstract
Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity. We find that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to comprehend over time: not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease (for instance, captured by vocabulary richness or readability of lyrics), but we also observe that the structural complexity (for instance, the repetitiveness of lyrics) has decreased. In addition, we confirm previous analyses showing that the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative and that lyrics have become more personal over the last five decades. Finally, a comparison of lyrics view counts and listening counts shows that when it comes to the listeners’ interest in lyrics, for instance, rock fans mostly enjoy lyrics from older songs; country fans are more interested in new songs’ lyrics.
Good Lord! I had no idea that there were so many songs about money these days. In this eight-minute segment from Bill Maher’s new show, he decries what the desire for goods and dosh has done to the younger generation and their music. He quotes a lot of old rock lyrics about being poor (I remember ’em all!), and compares them to modern ones extolling Gucci, Givency, Rolex, and so on.. Let’s just say that if I wrote this, I’d be called a “get off my lawn” geezer. But Maher is right, and as funny as usual.
Money quote: “Vomiting an inventory of your possessions doesn’t make you a poet.”
I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but now I’ve formulated a rule about it.
I think that the trend for one person to talk at great length in conversations started—or at least increased exponentially—during the pandemic. I noticed then, and am still noticing, that there’s an increase in the amount of monologuing during conversations. (My theory for this, which is mine, is that people were isolated during the pandemic, and made up for it by talking a lot during social interaction.) That is, you can be having a a chat with someone, and during that time the person you’re talking to tends to dominate the discourse, going on and on for minutes at a time. Often this is accompanied by a lack of interest in the more laconic person, and if that happens to be me, I feel that the yakkers are interested only in themselves, not in the person they’re talking to. In other words, I see monloguing not only as a bit rude, but also self-centered. Since I don’t like to interrupt people (that’s a rule I had in my discussion seminars when I was teaching), I wind up feeling that I’ve been to a lecture, not a conversation.
I believe I’ve heard the rule below somewhere, but can’t remember where. But here’s the rule, which is now mine and here it is:
If you’re having a conversation with someone, you should utter only one to three sentences before you give the other person a chance to talk.
I hasten to add that I’m not indicting everyone here, just a few people. Nor should you assume that if you talk to me regularly, you’re one of the guilty parties!
Now clearly there are exceptions: people telling stories or jokes, or when the other person encourages a monologue. But otherwise, if you want to have a real conversation in which ideas are exchanged and personal bonds formed, I suggest adhering to the 1-3 sentence rule. I am trying to do this myself now.
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Here’s a cartoon taken from a very helpful article called “When you talk too much” on the site Etiquette for the Business of Life:
