Everything I need to know I learned from Vanity Fair
To the Editor:
Re "Celebrity Appeal Keeps Magazine Circulation Mostly Higher" (Business Day, Feb. 21):
Perhaps the fact that celebrity weeklies continue to climb while the newsweeklies stay flat is reflective of a society that, surrounded by upsetting news, prefers to keep its head in the sand.
One means of reducing the dissonance created by the perception that we have no power or influence on the world around us is to compartmentalize the problem and retreat from it into trivia, or in this case celebrity magazines.
Not surprisingly, many of us embrace a shallow worldview where things are understandable, predictable and controllable. Most of us can name the characters of our favorite television shows, but we flounder when asked for the names of cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices or leaders of other nations.
We display an increasing ability to take the trivial very seriously, in no small part because the trivial is understandable and nonthreatening.
Douglas Raybeck
Clinton, N.Y., Feb. 21, 2006
The writer is a cultural anthropologist and professor, Hamilton College.
posted by Waage on Monday, February 27, 2006
4 Comments:
I once dated a professor at Hamilton. Go Hamilton, the bastion of the "The Gentleman's 'C'!" Nice post and great blog.
I once WAS a professor at Hamilton! Don't think I ever dated Jeneiene, though.
Paris who?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/14/hilton_movie/
Well, I'll be damned! When were you there, Steve? And which dept? My ex-partner was in the History Dept. from '89-'91. I loved it there.
The kids turned me on to the newest hip hop, and it was the only campus where you could see a distingued female English professor walk across the lawn of her turn of the century pillored house in her nightgown at 2am to tell the frat boys next door to turn it the hell down, please.
Awesome graveyard to get drunk in too!
Ah, thanks Melissa for this walk down memory lane.
Post a Comment
<< Home