Anderson’s first hint at this path is in The Royal Tenenbaums, where in a flashback, we see Margot and Richie run away to live in a museum, a reference to the lovely book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that enchanted my sister and I when we went to see it in the theatre.

What exactly do we call this trend? It’s new, no other generation has gone through a phase exactly like this. We are reliving/re-engaging with our childhoods through new media interpretations of old childhood experiences. Sesame Street turned 40 last week, and Facebook was there to host our memorializing (but ephemeral) clip-fest. Our past is our present.

Yes, other generations have experienced the return of the past, as the 70′s had their comeback and before that the 60s and before that…. But what’s different about that is that the pop music that came back into fashion, the clothes, the hairstyles and the idols, these are markers of adulthood for most people, the process of coming of age. It’s more an exercise in reliving a heady period of taking chances and maturation to immerse yourself in retro.

But our childhoods are indisputably back and taking center stage in our daily lives, and not necessarily through a reinterpretation for our children. Even before Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary, Wonder Showzen has already done its best to de-sacredize (desecrate isn’t working for me) the Sesame Street lessons and songs we grew up taking as gospel. Our childhood objects are no longer only the ken of children. Will this affect our relationship to childhood objects today?

My guess is no–I don’t watch Dora the Explorer, or Caillou, or any of the anime shows that seem to dominate children’s programming today. But will today’s children just keep holding onto their childhood idols as they age? That’s a better question. I’m not sure, today’s media cycle is speedy and fitful, longevity and endurance seems an unlikely by-product. But it’s the collision of that culture with Anderson’s Long Tail that makes me wonder.

“I noticed the other day that my Amazon sales ranking had disappeared. Now I know why: all books labeled as having “gay and lesbian” content have been stripped of rankings and searchability. The main entry for my book no longer shows up under either “Leaving India” or my name. Outrageous. Any thoughts about how to protest are welcome.”

Fore more, check out Mark Probst’s experience.

This isn’t the only questionable Amazon practice coming to light, the Guardian has more about Amazon’s labor practices.

I’m not buying from Amazon anytime soon. Killed my loyalty entirely. Hope you join the boycott too. Sigh, I have to admit I’m a little sad, I really liked Amazon.

More from Minal:

An astronaut movie more like Solaris and nothing like Apollo 13.

Why: A great scifi plot, Sam Rockwell, an amazing actor who has so far skimmed slightly under the radar, and Kaya Scodalerio from Skins, my favorite show from 2008.

Light Boxes

A novel by Shane Jones about a war waged by a group of balloonists against the month of February.

Why: It’s about a war. Waged by balloonists. Against the month of February! And Jesse Ball has good things to say, who wrote the lovely Samedi the Deafness.

Faintheart

A romantic comedy set in the world of battle re-enactments, about an irresponsible guy who has to shape up in order to win back his wife.

Why: Battle re-enactments and love. And Ewan Bremner!

Florence and the Machine

Her debut album should be out this year on Island.

Why: Her single Dog Days are Over is basically a spiritual experience, and she plays with MGMT, who put out my favorite album from 2008.

Ang Lee’s most recently released film, 2007’s Lust, Caution has been described by critics as an espionage thriller, which does little to convey the major themes of this elegant elegy that follows a young girl’s journey from student to spy.

Based on the 1979 novella by Chinese writer Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution opens with a brief but graceful credits sequence, which gives way to an incongruous close up on an alert German Shepherd. From the dog, the camera travels up the body of his uniformed handler to his deeply suspicious face. His gaze rapidly shifts right, then up, before the camera cuts to an armed guard in the same uniform pacing across a balcony. A few more shots of guards stationed on the same city street establishes that the area is heavily policed, broken only by a group of seemingly relaxed men talking and smoking on the sidewalk. From here, we transition inside, cutting to the interior of a house where a maid is bringing a tray of elegant soup bowls to four fashionable women playing a lightening-speed round of mahjong. This opening sequence introduces a clear visual distinction between the external war-tinged world of men and the insulated interior domain of women, a dichotomy that is to be breached most notably by the two main characters in the film.

The film arguably has two main characters, although we follow one more closely through the story, which is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the late 1930s and early 1940s during a period of Japanese occupation. Chia Chi is a young women at university who is drawn into a school acting troupe, where she finds success as its leading lady. Soon, the charismatic troupe leader is urging the group to do more than put on patriotic plays, and the group finds their cause in trying to assassinate Mr. Yee, a high-ranking Chinese government official collaborating with the Japanese. Chia Chi is remade as Mrs. Mak, an elegant society wife who befriends Mrs. Yee to catch the eye of her husband. Although she succeeds, the Yees move back to Shanghai before the assassination plan can be put into action, leaving the troupe in disarray.

The film moves forward several years to reveal Chia Chi in deep despair, with seemingly little future beyond a subsistence living in her aunt’s home. She is rediscovered by her co-conspirators, who have joined the secret police, and she is quickly recruited to return to her role as Mrs. Mak in the hopes of successfully carrying out the early mission against Mr. Yee, who has become the head of the secret police, responsible for the torture and deaths of countless members of the resistance. After successfully reestablishing her relationship with Mrs. Yee, she soon embarks on a violent and passionate affair with Mr. Yee, which strips them both bare of years of solidly established defenses, leading to the final tragic denouement.

As with many of Lee’s films, Lust, Caution features a muted palette tinged with a golden hue that evokes a subtle glamour. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto brings a modest but assured style to the composition, which works perfectly to showcase the period setting. In his sure handling of the period setting, this film continues Ang Lee’s tradition of developing a richly detailed portrait of a particular time and place as a unique and personalized moment in history, much in the tradition of the famed Merchant Ivory productions of 1980s and 1990s.

The graphic, sometimes violent sex scenes created some controversy before the film opened, and earned it an NC-17 rating in the US. The scenes, mostly between the two main characters, are essential to moving the story forward and often devastating in the vulnerability on display. Much of the narrative is told through the play of emotion on their faces, and this emotional interplay does much to define the arc of the story. Newcomer Tang Wei is a revelation as Chia Chi, effortlessly moving her character through a vast personal journey over a period of years. And Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who was such an excellent proxy for Wong Kar Wai’s vision in In the Mood for Love and 2046, wholly disappears into the cold, bruised Mr. Yee, demonstrating another facet of his dramatic range.

Herman and Chomsky cover the rise of media from its beginnings in the 19th century. When a working class media source rose in the mid-nineteenth century, it united workers because it “promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the potential power of working people to effect social change.” This led to taxes, libel laws and other coercive actions to try to muffle radical media by raising costs.

And in the discussion of Size, Ownership and Profit-Orientation, they mention that market forces encouraged a dependent model soon after the rise of the newspaper. In 1918, The Sunday Express spent over 2 million pounds before breaking even (where in 1837, a thousand pounds would yield a profitable newspaper). And by 1945, “even small-newspaper publishing [was] big business.”

With the Internet, one sees similar power plays at work in both challenges to net neutrality and copyright law litigation. Net neutrality is all about access, keeping the barriers to entry as low as possible by keeping costs low, very similar to the taxation model considered in combating working class media. Libel laws find their parallel in the policement of copyright and intellectual property rights, especially by the RIAA, who is still attempting to widen the scope of their property rights even as the corporate album sales industry is dying. It remains to be seen how the Internet will treat independent media sources in the long run and whether the market will naturally run them out of business as was the case in the late 19th century.

Gladwell had a dizzying rise to fame with the publication of The Tipping Point, in which he takes a series of seemingly unrelated ideas and unifies them to excellent end, creating an extended discussion of one of the more mysterious influences in life–momentum. The Tipping Point emerged as not only a runaway bestseller, but also a call to action for social marketers and nonprofit organizations, who took inspiration from its pages to devising new ways to try to advance their causes. Blink followed in 2005, providing musings about a split-second unconscious decision-making process that, Gladwell argues, guides our lives.

It seems the main critique of Gladwell is that his anecdotal lecture style is very enjoyable and easy to follow, even when he’s discussing radical or hard-to-grasp concepts. And the fame. He’s got too much of it. And finally, the consulting, often corporate. He charges too much for his speaking engagements and has become … wealthy. This isn’t to say that there aren’t fair criticisms to be made about Gladwell’s work, but most seem inspired by less than gracious impulses.

The first critique is elitist, implying that easy-to-follow must mean dumbed-down. The second fame argument is similarly sneeringly dismissive of his audiences, suggesting that the people who come to his sold out lectures are too numerous to be smart. If the masses like him, he must be shallow. The final critique has a little too much righteous indignation/sour grapes–it is notable that Gladwell’s income is the first thing mentioned about him in Louis Bayerd’s review of his new work on Salon.com.

And so, we run up against an increasingly relevant 21st century issue: people are smarter in greater numbers, and elitism is an outdated concept. We’ve entered the age of the participatory culture, in which the masses are finally gaining parity in access and education to the elites. This isn’t simply a technological advance, it’s a permanent revolution in how our society is structured, how we interact with one another, and how we conceive of one another.

The irony of the sneers at Gladwell is that his latest book, Outliers, is about smart people, where they come from, why they are successful. Outliers attempts to bust the myth that genius is entirely up to the individual, and at its heart, has this simple message: anyone has the potential to be a genius, given the right opportunities. So shouldn’t we try to give them to everyone? It’s a staggeringly democratizing message, so no wonder some intellectuals are up in arms at having to share their most precious commodity, intellectual prowess. And on a complete tangent, I think it’s funny that no one can write about him without mentioning his fro.

Debord offers no epistemological grounding for his idea. He works primarily through shaping a Marxist-inspired lexis of descriptors for characteristics of modern life, and tracing connections from the society to the individual. The primary limitation of the work is that there is simply no evidence used to support Debord’s arguments. The short theses that compose the entirety of the work are digestible and compelling in structure, but are also easy to challenge in validity.

Debord’s ideas have left their mark on modern thinkers in a number of areas, including but hardly limited to media studies and youth culture studies. The notion of society as a spectacle is often employed when discussing popular culture and its alienating effects, and the adjective spectacular is often used to describe apolitical youth concerned with the image in identity through music, fashion, and art.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Fredy Perlman, Jon Supak. Detroit: Black & Red, 1970. Print.

In describing global youth culture, Kahn and Kellner use the Frankfurt School definition of the culture industry to describe the relationship between youth and media, while focusing on the Birmingham School’s definition of political subversion to illustrate political dimensions to the youth culture. The authors question the relevance of the idea of subculture in a global context, opening the door for what is called “market-based tribalism.” Kahn and Kellner’s work weaves together a survey of previous work in cultural and media studies to build a context for a surrent understanding of global youth culture. Primarily drawing on historically relevant theoretical works from the aforementioned schools, the authors describe the main ideas and present some of the limitations of each through content and historical analysis.

The most striking limitation to the paper is its omission of any discussion of how global youth culture shapes the culture industry. It is well-established that not only are youth influenced by the culture industry but they also contribute to and serve as an influence on the culture industry. In this paper, the authors limit their role to a passively receptive one, with the notable exception of the political sphere. The paper is, however, an important step forward in situating critical study of global youth culture in a theoretical framework of references. By introducing the term global youth culture and tracing its roots, Kahn and Kellner pave the way for future work on the population linked to it.

Youth Culture
Richard Kahn; Kellner, Douglas
p. 1319-1321

The article introduces a number of technical definitions used to distinguish the legal status of immigrants. An immigrant who leaves their country of origin because of political persecution and who seeks protection or refuge in a host country is known as an asylum seeker or asylee. An unaccompanied refugee minor is a person under 18 who is fleeing their country of origin because of danger without accompaniment of an adult and without the option of returning. A family where the parents in the family lack legal status but one or more child is born in the US and has citizenship is known as a mixed status family. The major point made is that three important factors can fundamentally alter the services an individual can either access or benefit from: legal status, migration experience, and strength of cultural values.

Inspired by the public health perspective of prevention, the author draws on her background working with immigrant populations and legal education to make her case. The study cites a variety of statistics from primary studies and policy reports to argue that immigrants are a sizeable and varied group in the US who are particularly susceptible to mental health problems.

The article is very focused on persuading readers to consider the effects of three aspects of immigration, but doesn’t delve deeply enough to offer targeted techniques to deal with them. Brief at three pages, the piece could easily be cut to two pages and still convey the same amount of information. While omitting specific strategies for the three factors identified, it is a good starting point for professionals looking for a deeper understanding of immigration issues and where to focus on improving their intake planning processes and prevention programs. Creative readers will find ways to apply the ideas to good use.

Immigrant and Refugee Youth: Migration Journeys and Cultural Values
Rowena Fong
The Prevention Researcher; Nov 2007; 14, 4;
p. 3

The book is written for a broad audience and assumes that readers may be skeptical about the intentions and character of the homeless population with minimal or erroneous knowledge of the demographic makeup of the population. Most crucially, the author assumes that readers believe homeless individuals are fully responsible for their homeless state and focuses on proving this assumption wrong.

The name given to the pilot program, Residential Education Training center, reflects a multi-pronged approach that attempts a comprehensive education and training program bolstered by social services including child care and family counseling. Da Costa-Nunez also introduces the needs assessment, a systematic process for identifying needs and arranging them in priority order for resolution. The identified needs are used to determine which strategies and programs will be most effective in equipping a family with the tools needed to become self-sufficient. Needs Assessments have become the starting point for any social service provider.

The account draws on a variety of public policy analytic methods to create its case for funding social services to support homeless families nationwide. Da Costa-Nunez brings together a variety of data points from reports on demographics of the homeless population in New York, funding dollars and where they have been directed, and outcomes from the RET Center that function as a case study and pilot program to be replicated across the country. He also incorporates pithy quotes from homeless individuals and families as well as service providers about the success of the program that personalize the outcomes and offer an emotional appeal, accompanied as they are by appealing studio portrait shots of the families and children in the system.

The major limitation of the work is that it is confined to New York. However, it has proved a seminal work in moving the public policy agenda on homelessness in the US in a holistic public health direction, and da Costa-Nunez proves to be a persuasive, powerful and authoritative voice on the topic.

By concretizing the causes of homelessness and demonstrating that there are practical solutions to reducing these causes, da Costa-Nunez takes the idea of homelessness out of isolated abstraction and place it within a larger context of basic needs that can be met through a sensible and cost-effective network of social services. In reviewing the literature around the topic today, it is clear that this book has had a huge impact on current framing of the issues and solutions. The book has been a seminal work in the field for providing a compelling public policy framing for the topic of homelessness that reverses the trend of demonizing the population, and makes the case for directing funding towards long-term multi-pronged strategies and programs rather than simply offering short-term shelter and meals.

Hopes, Dreams & Promises: The Future of Homeless Children in America
Ralph da Costa-Nunez
New York: Homes for the Homeless, Inc. 1994