Elizabeth Bruenig: “Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind.” ✝️
Molly Haskell first described the problem in 1975, in her classic study From Reverence to Rape: “Women, in the early and middle ages of film, dominated. It is only recently that men have come to monopolize the popularity polls, the credits, and the romantic spotlight … back in the twenties and thirties, and to a lesser extent the forties, women were at the center.” Haskell was writing in response to the New Hollywood movement — a brief, brilliant blip in movie history when major studios let young European-inspired directors make movies about anything they wanted. Most often, they wanted to make movies about themselves, or their alter egos — at any rate, about men. I’m not knocking it. The artist-driven approach produced many great films, which also happened to be overwhelmingly male. Hollywood has changed since then, but the balance has not changed with it. The ironic truth is that it was at the height of the studio system — the great American movie factory — when women ruled the screen.
🎥
The group examined the question: “What happens in your brain when you walk down the street?” and they concluded that urban environments are not pleasing to the human brain. The reason is the lack of fractals in modern architecture and spaces. Fractals are patterns that self-repeat at different scales, and they can be found all over nature in objects like trees, rivers, clouds and coastlines. […]
“As soon as we look at nature, it triggers a cascade of automatic responses,” Taylor explained. “Even before we’ve noticed what we’re looking at, we’re responding to it.” And the response is a positive one. Humans experience less stress and better well-being when looking at nature, and this is driven by fractals. Taylor’s research has found that fractals can reduce stress and mental fatigue for the observer by as much as 60 percent.
Taylor also points to research that showed hospitalized patients could heal faster when they had access to a window because looking outside, and at all of the natural fractals, helped patients relax their bodies and heal faster.
I wrote about authors and their handwriting.
Nah, they’re right. 100%.
Occasinally I re-post old essays and reviews of mine to my own site. Today I’ve posted my 2015 review of Adam Roberts’s extraordinary edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.
Phil Christman: “In a sufficiently torpid service — one in which the leaders are running on sheer willpower, as I often am simply in showing up — the ill-behaved kids can be the only sign of life. They are God’s simultaneous recognition of and dissent from our solemn boringness.”
Brad East says Christians are conspiracy theorists! Hmmm … I wonder who paid him to say that.