Culture – Page 3 – The Scholar's Stage

Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”

24 June, 2019Books and Literature, Culture, History

Flappers playing mahjong. Image source. Last week’s post, “If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?,” asked what a 21st century version of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s might look like. Here is how I described the book in that post: […]

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The Inner Life of Chinese Teenagers

19 April, 2019Community, Culture, Narrative, The Middle Kingdom

This video is a good demonstration of what Chinese teenagers (or in this case, a Taiwanese teenager) mean when they say the 2D world is more ‘meihao’ than the 3D one. I have spent a great deal of time with Chinese teenagers. When I lived in Beijing, I paid no rent: instead I lived in […]

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Taking Cross Cultural Psychology Seriously

21 December, 2018Bargaining and Balancing, Cognition, Culture, Political Theory

Image Source. Note that this image is not from the pre-print. I just found it through googling. In that way, an explanation would be forthcoming for the future of certain nations which appear to be drawn by an unknown force towards a goal which they are unaware. –Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835) Cross-cultural psychology […]

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Why Is the Fight for Free Speech Led by the Psychologists?

05 November, 2018Community, Culture, Narrative

Image Source DR. STOCKMANN: It’s my own fault. I should have faced them down long ago—shown my teeth—and bite back! Call me an enemy of society! So help me God, I’m not going to swallow that! MRS. STOCKMANN: But Thomas dear, your brother does have the power— DR. STOCKMANN: Yes, but I’m in the right! […]

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Notes From All Over (9/10/18): Constitutional Cycles, Cognitive Gadgets, and the Uses of Repression

09 October, 2018Bharat, By The People, Cognition, Culture, Military Affairs, Narrative, Notes From All Over, The Middle Kingdom

TOP BILLING “The Recent Unpleasantness: Understanding the Cycles of Constitutional Time”Jack M. Balkin, Public Law Research Paper No. 648. 8 August 2018. (Indiana Law Journal, 2018 Forthcoming). Our present condition is a little like an eclipse, although much less enjoyable. To understand what is going on today in America, we have to think in terms […]

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So Why Did They Publish Them? – A Few Notes on the Latest Batch of Fail-to-Replicates

02 September, 2018Cognition, Culture

The big news this week is a fresh study in Nature that reports the results of a team that sought to replicate 21 high profile experiments in social psychology, all originally published by the journals Nature or Science between the years 2010 and 2015. The study has garnered a lot of headlines. You can read […]

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Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

27 August, 2018Culture, Ecology, Small and Simple Things

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. […]

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Notes From All Over 04/08/2018 (WEIRD Catholics, Chinese Intimidation Tactics, and Human Genetics)

05 August, 2018Books and Literature, Community, Culture, Europa Regina, Military Affairs, Notes From All Over, The Middle Kingdom

A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology”Jonathan Schulz, Duman Barahmi-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. PsyArXiv. 2 July 2018. Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, […]

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Being vs. Doing in Ancient Chinese Thought–A Note

11 July, 2018Cognition, Culture, Narrative, The Middle Kingdom

Yesterday’s excerpt from the Zuo Zhuan is an excellent case study in the difficulty of translating classical Chinese into English (or into modern Chinese, for that matter). Here is the sentence of interest, as translated by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Lee, and David Schaberg: Having watched from her bedchamber, the girl said, “Gongsun Hei is handsome, to be […]

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Manning Up in Ancient China

10 July, 2018Culture, The Middle Kingdom

One of many delightful pearls found inside the Zuo Zhuan, the oldest historical narrative in East Asia: The younger sister of Xuwu Fan of Zheng was beautiful. You Chu had already formalized his engagement with her when Gongsun Hei sent someone who insisted on presenting her with a betrothal fowl. Alarmed, Xuwu Fan told Zichan. […]

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