These foods are convenient, affordable, highly profitable, strongly flavoured, aggressively marketed – and on sale in supermarkets everywhere. The foods themselves may be familiar, yet the term “ultra-processed” is less so.

Its extremism goes straight back to Flake’s hero, Senator Barry Goldwater, who saw mainstream liberals as subversive socialists and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’-rights grounds. In that year’s Presidential election, Goldwater received potent support from the best-selling writers Phyllis Schlafly, whose book “A Choice Not an Echo” imagined cabals of liberal Republicans plotting against the Party’s base, and John Stormer, who, in “None Dare Call It Treason,” warned that pro-Communist élites were infesting American institutions. Reagan’s famous half-hour commercial for Goldwater described the welfare state as the path to totalitarianism. Apocalyptic thinking, conspiracy theories, and bigotry haunted the movement from the start.

an enthusiastic band of hobbyists with a taste for the retro and a fondness for old-school fan pages.

The written records of popular culture included awide range, from almanacs to the scriptures of religious sects. Localoperas or other dramas were organized and enacted at market towns orat the village level or often by lineages. But throughout the popular cul-ture dissident voices were not permitted to be heard and were destroyedif possible.

With this wide support of morality went the menace of the criminallaw and punishment of malefactors against morality, especially againstthe dynasty. This application of the law against evildoers or the merethreat of evildoing included the uninhibited investigation of people intheir households and personal lives and the use of judicial torture to en-courage confessions. The ankle squeezer used in court was stepped up soas to maximize pressure, and it could turn bones into jelly when skillfullyapplied. When in doubt as to what law had been violated, the magis-trate-judges could fall back on the statute against “doing what ought notto be done,” whatever it might have been.By these rewards and punishments it was hoped the common peoplecould be kept in the proper path. The punishment of relatives was a reg-ular part of the punishment of the criminal. The ancient device of groupresponsibility meant in effect guilt by association.In the theocratic Chinese state that extolled the emperor as Son ofHeaven, heterodoxy was perpetually guarded against. The strategic elitestratum was the local leadership that began with the roughly one millionlower gentry or holders of the first-level (shengyuanorjiansheng)de-grees, which did not qualify one for official appointment but conferred aprivileged status and opportunity to seek higher degrees. To these wereadded possibly five million male commoners, more or less, who hadachieved some amount of classical education. With their help, the indoc-trination of the common people was pursued by the elite as a Neo-Con-fucian duty.As an example let us cite the use of theSacred Edict (shengyu)of theKangxi Emperor issued in 1670 as 16 maxims for the guidance of dailyconduct. Each maxim seven characters long, they conveyed, as VictorMair (in Johnson et al., 1985) says, “the bare bones of Confucian ortho-doxy as it pertained to the average citizen.” After 1670 appeared com-mentaries, paraphrases, adaptations, and so on, in a considerable liter-ature. The idea of explicating classical texts in written colloquialversions seems to have begun in the Yuan dynasty.

In today’s media environment where citizens observe events directlywith less need but more supply of symbols, it is not easy to appreciate theimportance of ritual and ceremony in an earlier time. One basis of thegovernment of imperial China was the proper performance of ceremo-nies at all levels of society. The son kowtowed to his father as his fathermight do toward the emperor and his officials, for the essence of the civilorder was to differentiate the hierarchy of relationships. Proper conduct,it was hoped, externalized one’s inner values; but even in the absence ofinner feelings, one’s performance of ritual could provide a common for-mal bond with others. In this way the appearance of harmony could as-sure it. As Naquin and Rawski (1987) put it, “luanwas the disorder thatcould arise within the state, the community, the household or the indi-vidual when ethical norms and correct ritual were not followed. The de-sire to promote order and preventluanpermeated Chinese society fromtop to bottom.”

In the domain of literati thinking, the ideas of the statesman-philosopherWang Yangming (Wang Shouren, 1472–1529) gained many adherentsand inspired scholars to follow a new bent in Neo-Confucianism. Wangwas a very competent scholar-official and general who suppressed rebel-lions over a number of years and also devoted himself to building up thelocal community through the use of the Community Compact(xiang-yue).This institution was one of Confucianism’s closest approaches torevivalism. As a philosopher, Wang pursued the idea of Zhu Xi’s contem-porary, Lu Xiangshan, in developing a less practice-centered and morecontemplative approach to moral training and self-cultivation. Wangtaught that the world of principle is a unity and lies within as well as out-side one. Therefore, one should learn to be guided by intuitive knowl-edge achieved through careful thought and meditation. This had Bud-dhist overtones. Wang’s famous insistence on the unity of theory andpractice really demanded, as Willard J. Peterson (1979) notes, “the unityofmoralknowledge andsocialaction.” Wang Yangming’s teaching hadwide influence in Japan as well as in China.

To reach the populace, Zhu Xi used the vernacular and also advo-cated using the periodic local residents’ meeting known as the Commu-nity Compact(xiangyue).Although it came into general use only in theMing dynasty after 1368, this institution originated in a prototype estab-lished in 1077 by the Lü family. It consisted of a monthly assemblywhere food was eaten and a record of proceedings kept. One or twoheads were elected, and quite detailed regulations regarding behaviorwere adopted. Zhu Xi produced an amended version of the Lü family’sregulations that was even more detailed. It stressed hierarchy, for exam-ple by establishing five age-grades with rules for the conduct of all mem-bers of different categories. The aim was obviously to tell educated elitefamilies how to behave. Zhu assumed that the ordinary dress and majorrituals would be those of the elite. Seating by seniority would not applyto the non-elite, if they ventured to be present. Zhu Xi’s amendmentsalso contained detailed instructions on the way to greet a fellow compactmember, when to make calls on fellow compact members, how to invitethem to banquets, and how to conduct banquets—what to wear, whatname cards to use, and so on. What an organization man

The examination system became an enormous and intricate institu-tion central to upper-class life. During a thousand years from the Tang to1905 it played many roles connected with thought, society, administra-tion, and politics.

nized in gradations of inferiority and superiority. This hierarchic princi-ple in turn was the basis for a stress on duties rather than rights, on theevident assumption that if everyone did his duty everyone would getwhat he deserved. Thus, the filial son obedient to his parent would baskin the parent’s approval. With all duties performed, society would be inorder to everyone’s benefit.

Early China’s cosmology (her theory of the universe as an orderedwhole) shows striking points of difference with Western thought. Forexample, the early Chinese had no creation myth and no creator-lawgiver out of this world, no first cause, not even a Big Bang. As JosephNeedham says, they assumed “a philosophy of organism, an orderedharmony of wills without an ordainer.” This view contrasts with the in-veterate tendency elsewhere in the world to assume a supernatural deity.Westerners looking at China have continually imposed their own pre-conceptions on the Chinese scene, not least because the Chinese, thoughthey generally regarded Heaven as the supreme cosmic power, saw it asimmanent in nature, not as transcendent. Without wading further intothis deep water, let us note simply that Han thought as recorded in classi-cal writings built upon the concept of mankind as part of nature andupon the special relationship between the ruler and his ancestors, con-cepts that were already important in Shang thought over a millenniumearlier.

Here lies one source of China’s “culturalism”—that is, the devotionof the Chinese people to their way of life, an across-the-board sentimentas strong as the political nationalism of recent centuries in Europe.Where European nationalism arose through the example of and contactwith other nation-states, Chinese culturalism arose from the differencein culture between China and the Inner Asian “barbarians.” Because theInner Asian invaders became more powerful as warriors, the Chinesefound their refuge in social institutions and feelings of cultural and aes-thetic superiority—something that alien conquest could not take away.

The contrast between Inner Asia and China proper is a striking onein nearly every respect. On the steppe, population is thinly scattered; to-day there are only a few million Mongols and hardly more than thatnumber of Tibetans in the arid plateau regions that more than equal thearea occupied by over a billion Chinese who trace their ancestry to theHan dynasty (see Table 1). The thinness of population in Inner Asia initself makes the life of the steppe nomads vastly different from thecrowded life of the Han Chinese.

While the family headship passes intact from father to eldest son, thefamily property does not. Early in their history the Chinese abandonedprimogeniture, by which the eldest son inherits all the father’s propertywhile the younger sons seek their fortunes elsewhere. The enormous sig-nificance of this institutional change can be seen by comparing Chinawith a country like England or Japan, where younger sons who have notshared their father’s estate have provided the personnel for government,business, and overseas empire and where a local nobility might grow upto challenge the central power. In China, the equal division of landamong the sons of the family allowed the eldest son to retain only certainceremonial duties, to acknowledge his position, and sometimes an extrashare of property. The consequent parcelization of the land tended toweaken the continuity of family land-holding, forestall the growth oflanded power among officials, and keep peasant families on the marginof subsistence. The prime duty of each married couple was to produce ason to maintain the family line, yet the birth of more than one son mightmean impoverishment.

The traditional family system was highly successful at preparing theChinese to accept similar patterns of status in other institutions, includ-ing the official hierarchy of the government. The German sociologistMax Weber characterized China as a “familistic state.” One advantageof a system of status is that a man knows automatically where he standsin his family or society. He can have security in the knowledge that if hedoes his prescribed part, he may expect reciprocal action from others inthe system.Within the extended family, every child from birth was involved in ahighly ordered system of kinship relations with elder brothers, sisters,maternal elder brothers’ wives, and other kinds of aunts, uncles, cousins,grandparents, and in-laws too numerous for a Westerner to keep trackof. These relationships were not only more clearly named and differenti-ated than in the West but also carried with them more compelling rightsand duties dependent upon status. Family members expected to be calledby the correct term indicating their relationship to the person addressingthem.In South China the pioneer anthropologist Maurice Freedman(1971) found family lineages to be the major social institutions—eachone a community of families claiming descent from a founding ancestor,holding ancestral estates, and joining in periodic rituals at graves and inancestral halls. Buttressed by genealogies, lineage members might sharecommon interests both economic and political in the local society. InNorth China, however, anthropologists have found lineages organizedon different bases. Chinese kinship organization varies by region. Familypractices of property-holding, marriage dowries, burial or cremation,and the like also have had a complex history that is just beginning to bemapped out.

In addition to this common bond of loyalty to family, the old Chinawas knit together by the common experience of a highly educated localelite, who were committed from childhood to studying and following theclassical texts and teachings. Motherly nurture and fatherly disciplinecombined to concentrate the young scholar’s effort on self-control andon the suppression of sexual and frivolous impulses. Instead, as JonSaari’s (1990) study of upper-class childhood in the late nineteenth cen-tury reiterates, the training of youth was in obedience above all. Once aboy entered his adolescent years, open affection from parents gave wayto intensive training aimed at proper character formation.

The trembling bride left herown family behind and became at once a daughter-in-law under the con-trol of her husband’s mother. She might see secondary wives or concu-bines brought into the household, particularly if she did not bear a maleheir. She could be repudiated by her husband for various reasons. If hedied, she could not easily remarry. All this reflected the fact that awoman had no economic independence. Her labor was absorbed inhousehold tasks and brought her no income. Farm women were almostuniversally illiterate. They had few or no property rights.

To Americans and Europeans with their higher material standard ofliving, the amazing thing about the Chinese farming people has beentheir ability to maintain a highly civilized life under these poor condi-tions. The answer lies in their social institutions, which have carried theindividuals of each family through the phases and vicissitudes of humanexistence according to deeply ingrained patterns of behavior. These insti-tutions and behavior patterns are among the oldest and most persistentsocial phenomena in the world. China has been a stronghold of the fam-ily system and has derived both strength and inertia from it.Until very recently the Chinese family has been a microcosm, thestate in miniature. The family, not the individual, was the social unit andthe responsible element in the political life of its locality. The filial pietyand obedience inculcated in family life were the training ground for loy-alty to the ruler and obedience to the constituted authority in the state.This function of the family to raise filial sons who would becomeloyal subjects can be seen by a glance at the pattern of authority withinthe traditional family group. The father was a supreme autocrat, withcontrol over the use of all family property and income and a decisivevoice in arranging the marriages of the children. The mixed love, fear,and awe of children for their father was strengthened by the great respectpaid to age. An old man’s loss of vigor was more than offset by hisgrowth in wisdom. As long as he lived in possession of his faculties, thepatriarch had every sanction to enable him to dominate the family scene.According to the law, he could sell his children into slavery or even exe-cute them for improper conduct. In fact, Chinese parents were by customas well as by nature particularly loving toward small children, and theywere also bound by a reciprocal code of responsibility for their childrenas family members. But law and custom provided little check on paternaltyranny if a father chose to exercise it.The domination of age over youth within the old-style family wasmatched by the domination of male over female. Even today, Chinesebaby girls seem more likely than baby boys to suffer infanticide.

This different relation of human beings to nature in the West andEast has been one of the salient contrasts between the two civilizations.Man has been at the center of the Western stage. The rest of nature hasserved as either neutral background or as an adversary. Thus Western re-ligion is anthropomorphic, and early Western painting anthropocentric.To see how great this gulf is, we have only to compare Christianity withthe relative impersonality of Buddhism, or compare a Song landscape, itstiny human figures dwarfed by crags and rivers, with an Italian primi-tive, in which nature is an afterthought.Living so closely involved with family members and neighbors hasaccustomed the Chinese people to a collective life in which the groupnormally dominates the individual. In this respect the Chinese experi-ence until recently hardly differed from that of other farming peopleslong settled on the land. It is the modern individualist, be he seafarer, pi-oneer, or city entrepreneur, who is the exception. A room of one’s own,more readily available in the New World than in the crowded East, hassymbolized a higher standard of living. Thus, one generalization in thelore about China is the absorption of the individual not only in the worldof nature but also in the social collectivity.

While having a sandwich, Gould customarily empties a bottle or two of ketchup on his plate and eats it with a spoon.

blackballed

He has given names to some of them. “Come here, Boss Tweed,” he says.

nudist

Bowery

Negro evangelist

the Raven Poetry Circle

Newsstand

Salvation Army song

aristocrats

Yankee

Chippewas

the Petaka culture plate (Celartia) maintains viability for up to two weeks of shipping or storage at ambient temperature

MASTERY, AUTONOMY, PURPOSE

Japanese attractions are refusing entry to tourists, and it’s easy to see why

However one might debate both the merit and the form of Prince’s note, we consider “slave” a provocative example of what can count as annotation and how annotation can spark - and shape - conversation.

audit culture (a culture characterized by a call to be objective and an unbridled emphasis on empiricism). Audit cultures support conservative educational policies

Science is part of culture, and how science is done depends on the culture in which it is practised. Consider how many medical studies were based on male mice and male patients, and so missed important biomedical insights.

This huge spread reflects the difference between two groups of people giving different answers to a highly innocuous question: ‘Is it more important for a child to be considerate or well-mannered?’ The answers sound almost identical, but social psychologists know that ‘considerate’ taps other-directed emotions while ‘well-mannered’ is about respect for authority. People’s answer to this question matters for Trump support because it taps into a cultural worldview sometimes known as Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Rather than RWA, which is a loaded term, I would prefer to characterise this as the difference between those who prefer order and those who seek novelty. Social psychologist Karen Stenner presciently wrote that diversity and difference tends to alarm right-wing authoritarians, who seek order and stability. This, and not class, is what cuts the electoral pie in many western countries these days. Income and material circumstances, as a recent review of research on immigration attitudes suggests, is not especially important for understanding right-wing populism.

Cantonese: Language or dialect?

Speaking a tonal language (such as Cantonese) primes the brain for musical training

Tonal languages arose in humid climates

The Language of Power Distance

A discovery I and my team published in Science is that the strength of a culture’s norms isn’t random. Though they were separated by miles, and in some cases centuries, tight cultures as diverse as Sparta and Singapore have something in common: each faced (or faces) a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature – disasters, diseases, and food scarcity – or human nature – the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts. Strong norms are needed in these contexts to help groups survive. And when we look at loose cultures, from classical Athens to modern New Zealand, we see the opposite pattern: they enjoy the luxury of facing far fewer threats. This safety is used to explore new ideas, accept newcomers, and tolerate a wide range of behaviour. In contexts where there are fewer threats and thus less of a need for coordination, strong norms don’t materialise.

'The Ritz'

The prevalent practice of damaging images of the human form—and the anxiety surrounding the desecration—dates to the beginnings of Egyptian history. Intentionally damaged mummies from the prehistoric period, for example, speak to a “very basic cultural belief that damaging the image damages the person represented,” Bleiberg said. Likewise, how-to hieroglyphics provided instructions for warriors about to enter battle: Make a wax effigy of the enemy, then destroy it. Series of texts describe the anxiety of your own image becoming damaged, and pharaohs regularly issued decrees with terrible punishments for anyone who would dare threaten their likeness.

Notice that the Rawlsian Theory of Food Culture is different from my Airport Principle of Food. The Airport Principle says that, in an area which is really good at Food X, the airport version of Food X will probably be better than the very best version of Food X at many other places. The fish tacos in the LA airport, which are just part of a local SoCal chain, are better than the best fish tacos in all of New England. The chili dogs in the Detroit airport are better than any chili dog I’ve had on the whole of the West Coast. The Chicago deep dish pizza in the Chicago airport is a pale shadow of Chicago’s best, but so many leagues beyond the best Californian attempt that it blows my mind.

Anthony Bourdain wrote that that, after a lifetime of bouncing around New York and having his fill of crappy, thoughtless food, his first trip to Saigon almost shredded his soul. Every single bite of food he had was amazing. Every single person he could find selling food had made it with care and attention and sensitivity.

Let me suggest a corollary: the Rawlsian Theory of Food Culture. The Rawlsian Theory of Food Culture says that, if you want to judge the quality of a food culture, don’t look at its finest restaurants and best food. Look to its low-end. Look to its street carts, its gas-station snacks. Look to what you can get in the airport at 2 AM. Any community can spit up a few nice places to eat, if they throw enough money at it. What shows real love for food, and real caring, is when people make good food when they could get away with making crap.

Eun Heekyung cho biết hiện nay công chúng Hàn Quốc đang đắm chìm trong văn hóa đại chúng là các loại hình nghe nhìn. "Trong khi văn chương có tác dụng làm cho người ta nhận thức được giá trị cuộc sống, làm người ta hạnh phúc hơn khi đắm mình vào cuộc sống".

Asked which of his films are his personal favorites, Kore-eda — in characteristic fashion — expounded upon a familiar adage until it felt new: “It’s like asking someone which of their 10 kids you like the most. You may have one child who’s just ridiculously successful and making tons of money, and then you have this other child who’s living in poverty, but they’re just so lovable.” He grew silent for a moment, and then went on: “I would say there are two children who are most similar to myself. ‘Nobody Knows’ is the film that I became a director to make. ‘Still Walking’ is special to me because I made it shortly after losing my mother. Having said that, I also have to mention ‘Like Father, Like Son,’ because that film took me to the next level, to the point where I couldn’t believe this was really my career.”

The truth, as always, is more complicated. Kore-eda cited the formative experience he had with “After Life” in 1998, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival after a programmer sent the director a handwritten fax proclaiming his love for the movie. But a gala debut wasn’t enough to get the movie sold. The director sighed: “I received very blunt information from the agent saying that this isn’t the kind of film that people want — they didn’t want to see people in heaven, they wanted the kind of typical Japanese film that would be representative of a national cinema.” Emotionally inhibited parents drinking sake on tatami mats, rogue samurai wandering the countryside, geishas scuffling around the Gion, that sort of thing. It could have been a devastating moment, but Kore-eda chose to see it as a call to action. “That process made me realize that I don’t have to make what other people want,” he said. “‘After Life’ led me to have confidence that if I make something that I love, there will be fans and critics out there who will love it also, and won’t start putting labels on it.” To his point, “After Life” now regularly appears on (American) lists of the best films of the ’90s. “I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to find those people,” Kore-eda continued, “even when I’ve wanted to make films just because I liked them.”

“The traditional concept of family was already being dismantled or destroyed in Japan, and 3/11 just made it obvious that was happening. I believe you can no longer interpret the true value or purpose of family based on the antiquated traditional tropes of Japanese society. In ‘Shoplifters,’ I was looking at three generations living together, because that’s typically what you’d find in a Japanese household. But I wanted to play with that, and show that even within those terms the nuclear family is undergoing a permanent change.”

To watch Kore-eda’s films — and certainly to hear him talk about them — it’s clear that he’s not interested in judging this perceived degradation of traditional norms. These movies don’t lament what’s been lost so much as they wonder about what’s been found, a dynamic that allows even the most devastating pieces of Kore-eda’s work to feel intrinsically hopeful (his thoughts on the ending of “Shoplifters” were too spoiler-heavy to share here, but they made it clear the director savors that bittersweet aftertaste). His films are less concerned with passing a verdict on the state of things than they are in studying the various mechanisms that bind people together, and the performative elements required to keep us that way.

That’s exactly right. What’s the technique to avoiding that stance?I don’t think it’s a technique. I don’t think that’s something you can make up, or trick people into believing through your filmmaking. It comes from the fundamental worldview, the sense of humanity. It comes from the depth of the work’s creator. If you have that empathy, you won’t go down the road of voyeurism. You can’t just sympathize; you have to make visible what is invisible. Make visible the factors that have brought the impoverished to this point, so that the audience can see them in a fuller and more complex way. That skirts the trap of poverty porn. Regarding your initial question: I don’t want to present the film in such a way so that when the audience leaves the theater, they say, “Well, it’s the government’s fault! It’s the system’s fault!” That’s not what I’m trying to portray. They’re part of it, but the people watching the film are part of it, too, and they need to feel that by the end.

I’ve read that you visited an actual orphanage while researching this subject. What sort of emotional response did you have at that time?I did not go to an “orphanage,” per se. I went to a facility run by the government that houses children with parents who are dysfunctional in some way, through alcoholism or domestic abuse or something like that. Just wanted to clarify that first. While I was there, a young girl in grade three had just come back from school, and she read for me the book Swimmy by Leo Lionni. I happened to be there in time to witness this. The people who worked at the facility went, “Oh, no, don’t bother him; he doesn’t want to listen to this.” But she completely ignored them and kept reading this book right to the end. And at the very end, I applauded because she had done so wonderfully. The girl was absolutely thrilled by this, and she smiled a big smile, and it occurred to me that it was her parents that she wanted to have witness this reading of Swimmy. This moved me. That was the feeling I took with me when I made Shoplifters. The young boy in the film reads Swimmy, to show to his parents that he’s reading. That sense of pride and joy that the little girl had was something I held with me.

Sakura Ando gives a phenomenal performance as Nobuyo. Can you talk about your collaboration with her? I agree that she is phenomenal. To answer quite honestly, I first heard about Sakura Ando through actors or cameramen who are friends of mine or who I worked with. They all said she was amazing. I was still unsure she’d be right for my film because the part of Nobuyo was written for someone who’s in their 40s. However I ran into her in the neighborhood and we just talked for a little while. And then I ran into her a second time. After that I thought she might be the best person for this role [despite her age] and I offered her the job. You are a director who has successfully directed children in many of your films. How do you work with them? Thank you saying they are successful. For 15 years the way that I have worked with children is I never give them a script. They have no idea about the full story. Everyday when they come on set, I tell them each individual line when they need to know it. So I whisper in their ears this is your line, this is what you are going to talk about, sometimes they choose their own words. But also during auditions I choose children who specifically seem to respond to that method well. Once I’ve chosen them I organize activities to create trust and a relationship with them. My goal is to have them come to set every day smiling, excited and looking forward to the work. That’s my approach.

There is a density and depth to your stories and characters that’s reminiscent of novels. I’m interested in your writing process and how you come about it? That is a difficult question. First there's the person, a human. Then the situation and what if that situation causes the human to do something? I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but I don’t actually sit down and write all the details about each character, their whole history. If you were to attend a screenwriting course, often they’d tell you to sit down and define each character before writing the script. I don’t believe in that, I don't think character development is the way to go. For me it’s the relationships. The relationship between one person and the person standing in front of them. It’s the way they move, the way they react, and how they relate to each other. That’s what defines them. Take for example the character of the father Osamu, he’s defined by the context of the relationships around him. The story comes out of the numerous interactions between these different people.

Thinking of happy accidents, it looked like Miyu Sasaki, who plays the young Juri, really did lose a tooth. Is that something you had to incorporate into the script? On the first day of shooting, we were shooting the scene where she’s discovered on the veranda and it just happened that the tooth came out. [And she yelled] “Oh no, my tooth came out!” We talked about fixing it so there was a fake tooth there, but then I thought I might as well write a scene about losing her tooth. [SPOILERS AHEAD] Then I thought what would be really interesting would be to write a scene where the grandmother who has no teeth dies and the granddaughter loses her teeth and then you throw the teeth up on the roof, so I thought the combination of those two things would make it very interesting and I wrote it into the script.

Was the family’s home on screen a set or a real location? We did use a real house [for exteriors]. There was a small house that existed within all those high-rises, but most of the interior scenes were shot on set. There’s a scene where [you see] the entrance to the home [where] they’re on a little corridor or a little porch outside and when I went to see the house, I was just looking around it with my crew. it’s very near Sumida River, which is very famous for the fireworks coming up, so I just thought, “Oh, it’s very near the river, but [the family] would never be able to see the fireworks,” [which] stayed with me, so I decided to write a scene about it.

Is it true you got to shoot the first scenes of the film in the summer and then go back later to shoot the rest of the film, after you had an idea of how they might interact with one another? Yes. When we started shooting in the summer, the truth is the script wasn’t really finished. I hadn’t really had a complete script by that point and we shot it anyways because we thought we might need it. I told all the actors we may not even keep this scene and Kiki Kirin [who plays the grandmother] said, “Well, in that case, it probably won’t stay. It won’t survive.” [laughs] But then there’s the scene where it rains suddenly and where [the family] finds the cicada, so it was fortuitous when those things all happened. And then when I went back and wrote the script properly in the autumn, I incorporated some of those things in it.

There is a bit of a fantastical quality to the film, which comes through subtly through the score, and I loved how visually, there are often boxes created throughout the frame, particularly inside the family’s house. How did you go about getting the tone right aesthetically? In terms of the visual, in terms of Kondo [Ryuto, the cinematographer], when he talked to me about how he viewed it, he really wanted a poetic state, so visually we were looking at poetic images around their lifestyle and after about a certain amount of filming, I just let Kondo-san go — he was the one that decided the framing, so it was his sensibility that created those lines that you’re talking about. With Honoso [Haruomi, the composer], it was more the image of swimming, so the family were like a bunch of little fishes at the bottom of an ocean swimming around and they would look up at the surface and see the sparkling night, but the sound of that sparkling night would come down to the bottom and twinkle around it.

You’ve acknowledged that “After the Storm” marked a bit of a turning point where you’d start making films about broader Japanese society. What inspired that shift? I look at it a little bit differently because for me, from “Still Walking” to “After the Storm,” that thread was really very much about me looking at what went on inside of a family, inside of the home, [with] a narrow and deep perspective. But that was more the exception. With “The Third Murder,” I felt I went back to where I started, which was with “Nobody Knows” and looking at the family within society. That’s the thread I was following and then I got disrupted by my own personal inquiry.

Shoplifters’ question of whether this family counts as a “real” one does occasionally feel belabored. But its exploration of the layers, and limits, within this unlikely clan is so moving and observant that one can easily overlook that foible. Like nearly every mystery in the film, it isn’t meant to be resolved anyway. To spend time with the Shibatas is to make peace with a lack of answers. In so doing, Shoplifters achieves that ultimate goal of art as expressed by the artist Robert Filliou: It’s art that makes life more interesting than art.

All well and good, but what makes Kore-eda's movie so quietly devastating, the work of a master in full command of his art, is that its emotional rewards stem from a deep engagement with the world rather than a retreat from it. It's the rare movie indeed that can unite a jury without even remotely smacking of compromise.

Crazed Fruit: Imagining a New Japan—The Taiyozoku Films

Though this genre has existed for quite some time, it really blossomed the decade following World War II thanks to so-called “sun tribe” youth movies (these featured teens interested in violence and sex, similar to America’s Rebel Without A Cause). In the decades since, seishun eiga have generally focused on the ups and downs of adolescence, particularly high schoolers. “Seishun eiga offer the sort of clear window into Japan’s national culture, society and psyche that other, more internationally popular, genres don’t. Most Japanese survived high school; relatively few joined yakuza gangs,” the Japan Times film critic Mark Schilling has written. Since these movies can be loaded with cliches and melodrama, the laziest iterations of this style are often deeply formulaic.

Theo bà Ngô Phương Lan, năm 2017, Việt Nam đạt 3.250 tỷ đồng trong lĩnh vực điện ảnh. Trong đó, doanh thu từ phim Việt chiếm 28% nhờ quy định số suất chiếu phim Việt ở mỗi rạp phải chiếm 20% trên tổng số (theo nghị định 54). Tuy vậy, phim trong nước vẫn bị phim ngoại lấn át về sức cạnh tranh.

Korea's booming film industry and what it means for Australian cinema

3 reasons Japanese movies today suck, according to distributor and producer Adam Torel

“Korea is very dynamic, it is undergoing social and political change. Its culture reflects that. Its films are rooted in change,” Rayns said. “In Japan I don’t see that. I see stasis. I still see same right wing politicians denying the existence of comfort women, the same old stuff we’ve heard for 20, 30 or 40 years. Until we see some challenge to the establishment [in Japan] I don’t think you will see the same dynamism as in Korean cinema.”

The situation today is much less dynamic. Filmmaking in Japan has largely polarised, with very high budgets (by Japanese standards, i.e. US$ 10 million or a multiple of it) on the one extreme and no-budget indie (or amateur) filmmaking on the other. Films in the former category seek to emulate the Hollywood blockbuster formula and are produced by "film committees": consortia of production partners, the majority being television stations, advertising agencies and talent agencies rather than traditional film production companies. Each partner has a stake and a say in the filmmaking and the result more often than not literally comes across as something made by committee rather than artistic vision. It is a type of filmmaking that takes no chances: all the stories are based on hit properties (TV series, manga, novels) and the lead actors are pop musicians or TV talento, while the important share of media companies in the production committees is resulting in self-censorship and/or conservative political stances in line with the policies of Shinzo Abe’s government.

Asura flops, but shines a light on China’s increasingly sophisticated film audience

“Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions become ‘insoluble" when ‘disguised as cultural ones’” (Harvey) “Appeals to traditions and cultural values bulked large in all tif this. An open project around the restoration of economic power tb a small elite would probably not gain much popular support. But programmatic attempt to advance the cause of individual freedomis could appeal to a mass base and so disguise the drive to restoife class power.” (Harvey) The Republican Party “also appealed to the cultural nationalism of the white working classes and their besieged sense of moral righteousness (besieged because this class lived under conditions of chronic economic insecurity and felt excluded from many of the benefits that were being distributed through affirmative action and other state programmes). This political base could be mobilized through the positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, ü' not blatant, racism, homophobia, and anti- feminism. The problem was not capitalism and the neoliberaliza- tion of culture, but the ‘1iberals’ who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups (blacks, women, environ- mentalists, etc.). (Harvey)

In amplifying our intelligence, we are applying the principle of synergistic structuring that was followed by natural evolution in developing the basic human capabilities. What we have done in the development of our augmentation means is to construct a superstructure that is a synthetic extension of the natural structure upon which it is built. In a very real sense, as represented by the steady evolution of our augmentation means, the development of "artificial intelligence" has been going on for centuries.

For instance, an aborigine who possesses all of our basic sensory-mental-motor capabilities, but does not possess our background of indirect knowledge and procedure, cannot organize the proper direct actions necessary to drive a car through traffic, request a book from the library, call a committee meeting to discuss a tentative plan, call someone on the telephone, or compose a letter on the typewriter.

Our culture has evolved means for us to organize the little things we can do with our basic capabilities so that we can derive comprehension from truly complex situations, and accomplish the processes of deriving and implementing problem solutions. The ways in which human capabilities are thus extended are here called augmentation means, and we define four basic classes of them: 2a4 Artifacts—physical objects designed to provide for human comfort, for the manipulation of things or materials, and for the manipulation of symbols.2a4a Language—the way in which the individual parcels out the picture of his world into the concepts that his mind uses to model that world, and the symbols that he attaches to those concepts and uses in consciously manipulating the concepts ("thinking"). 2a4b Methodology—the methods, procedures, strategies, etc., with which an individual organizes his goal-centered (problem-solving) activity. 2a4c Training—the conditioning needed by the human being to bring his skills in using Means 1, 2, and 3 to the point where they are operationally effective. 2a4d The system we want to improve can thus be visualized as a trained human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology. The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts computers, and computer-controlled information-storage, information-handling, and information-display devices. The aspects of the conceptual framework that are discussed here are primarily those relating to the human being's ability to make significant use of such equipment in an integrated system.

cultivate a language

cu

The kind of participatory connected learning experiences that we are advocating for arenot easily described

new media

Because European and American debates today about whether western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.

For Arnold, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.

while brains may be wired to seethe world, how and what is seen is never without a cultural component.

entanglement of culture with environments and things

Rhetoric has a number of overlapping meanings

Try something crazy

I respect the idealism of blockchain developers who, I believe, are sincere in their faith that they are building a better world. But I am confounded by their inability to see that they are falling victim to exactly the same fallacies their hacker forebears embraced: this notion that we can code ourselves out of the deep holes we’ve dug; that we are building utopias in our virtualities that will finesse away the imperfections of human character.

Contrary to mainstream thinking that this new technology is unregulated, it’s really quite the opposite. These systems apply the strictest of rules under highly deterministic and predictable models that are regulated through mathematics. In the future, industry will be regulated not just by institutions and committees but by algorithms and mathematics. The new technology will gradually out-regulate the regulators and, in many cases, make them obsolete because the new system offers more certainty. Antonopoulos explains that “the opposite of authoritarianism is not chaos, but autonomy.”

It’s the nature of the more more more culture: if you can run two miles, isn’t it better to run five? If you can write an article about something, isn’t it better to turn it into a book? If you can speak in four places this semester, isn’t it better to add on just… one… more…?

“Any time when nurse practitioners and other providers get together, there is always this challenge of professions,” he says. “You’re doing this or you’re doing that, and once you get people who understand what the capabilities are past the title name and what you can do, it’s just amazing.”

“It didn’t shock me at the time because I had already made major changes in our intensive-care unit at the hospital, which were unpopular,” Dr. Gorman says, adding all of the changes were good for patients and produced “fabulous” results. “But it was new. And it was different. And people don’t like to change the status quo.”

culture industry

Liss LaFleur

Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.”

The end game of a surveillance society, from the perspective of those being watched, is to be subjected to whims of black-boxed code extended to the navigation of spaces, which are systematically stripped of important social and cultural clues. The personalized surveillance tech, meanwhile, will not make people less racist; it will make them more comfortable and protected in their racism.

I think the internet's core message can be summed up in one word: Share.

Mr. Dolby, born Thomas Robertson, took his stage name from Dolby Laboratories because of his fascination with audio technology. He said that he decided to use his nerd persona as a way of distinguishing himself from the “good-looking lads” on the 1980s pop scene — Sting, Simon Le Bon, Adam Ant.But, he added, “I am no more comfortable in my geek skin now than in 1982.”

known as charivari or casserole

Tolerating all ideas does not mean becoming a supporter of them. Saying everything does not mean accepting everything.

Indeed, school exclusion, without these supports, can exacerbate a bad situation. In the Parkland case, the fact that Nikolas Cruz had been expelled from school may have contributed to driving an angry young man who felt isolated to take out his frustration and anger by killing students and staff at his former school. In theory, zero-tolerance policies deter students from violent or illegal behavior because the punishment for such a violation is harsh and certain. However, research shows that such policies ultimately increase illegal behavior and have negative effects on student academic achievement, attainment, welfare, and school culture.

the kids are all right

If you want to understand the Christian extremism that represents the single greatest threat to democracy and human rights in America today, it’s important to understand how authoritarian Christians read the Bible.

I think it’s important for liberal Americans who do not come from a patriarchal religious background to hear our stories and to sit with that shock. Why? Because I remain convinced that if American civil society and the American press fail to come to grips with just how radically theocratic the Christian Right is, any kind of post-Trump soft landing scenario in which American democracy recovers a healthy degree of functionality is highly unlikely.

In a strong culture, there are many, overlapping, and cohesive interactions among all members of the organization.

From the above we can see that Virilio understands human history in terms of a race with time, of ever-increasing speeds that transcend humans' biological capacity. To theorize culture without the dromosphere, that is, the sphere of beings in motion, he therefore sugges,ts, misses the key point of cul­tural activity and the uniqueness of the industrial way of life. Without an explicit conceptualization of the contemporary dromosphere -or in my terms timescape -it is thus difficult to fully understand the human-technology-science-economy­equity-environmenr constellation. Moreover, it becomes impossible to appreciate that people are che weakest link when the time frames of action are compressed to zero and effects expand to eternity, when transmission and transplan­tation are instantaneous but their outcomes extend into an open future, when instantaneity and eternity are combined in a discordant fusion of all times.

Given our tendency to reify social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967, pp. 89-92, 134-136), we often regard the association of particular "signifiers" with particular "signifieds" (Saussure 1959, p. 67) as inevitable. Such symbolic relations, however, are essentially conventional and, quite often, arbitrary (Durkheim 1965, pp. 261-265; Mead 1934, pp. 117-125; Peirce 1932, Vol. 2, pp. 165-169; Saussure 1959, pp. 67

Culture, according to semiotics, is a communicational system consisting of various messages conveyed by and to members through the use of certain codes (Leach 1976; Lvi-Strauss 196

This system of demonstrating tasks to one robot that can then transfer its skills to other robots with different body shapes, strengths, and constraints might just be the first step toward independent social learning in robots. From there, we might be on the road to creating cultured robots.

Soon we might add robots to this list. While our fanciful desert scene of robots teaching each other how to defuse bombs lies in the distant future, robots are beginning to learn socially. If one day robots start to develop and share knowledge independently of humans, might that be the seed for robot culture?

If we didn’t have social learning, we wouldn’t have culture. As zoologists Kevin Laland and Will Hoppitt argue, “culture is built upon socially learned and socially transmitted information.” Socially acquired knowledge is distinct from what we learn individually and from information inherited through genes or through imitation.

Atthecruxofthisbook,underlyingeachcontributionandinformingthecollectiveenterprise,liesasharedconcernwiththearticulationofhistoricalsignificanceanditsproduction.

Themoreself-consciousonebecomes,themorecomplexone’srelationshiptoanobjectbecomes,physicallyandocularlyaswellaspsychologicallyandexperientially.

music and art were important in helping those early modern humans forge a sense of group identity and mutual trust that enabled them to become so successful.

Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs-male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his. Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds.

Fashion can change overnight. It takes a decade or two to change architecture, because it takes so long to become an architect. You have to go through a rigorous training program. The Cultural Revolution arrested the development of architecture in China.  It has taken this long for it to start coming back. The architecture schools are starting to become confident enough that they are starting to encourage students to draw their inspiration from their own environment and culture.   Until now, they have pretty much been borrowing from the West.  Finally, the professors that weren’t happy about the Cultural Revolution are dying or retiring, and younger, less cynical professors are coming forward and saying, “Being a Chinese architect is good. “ Wang Shu won the Prizker Prize not because he was the world’s great architect, but because he was one of the first in his generation of Chinese architects to be original and be Chinese at the same time, and not borrow from the West.  That will happen more and more.

When was Japan on fire in late '80s to early '90s, every famous architect in the world was in Japan. Every major hotel lobby would be filled with famous architects.  Today, there’s nobody there. The Japanese architects have taken control of their own country.  Now, the only people going work in Japan are Japanese architects. I have to believe that one day, the only people doing architecture in China will be Chinese architects

Is China's Architectural Ambition Leaving Its Own Talent Behind?

Japanese people tend to require more information before reaching a purchasing decision. So for printed brochures, it is standard practice for Japanese companies to create one text-heavy version for the Japanese domestic market, and another “rest of the world” version that gets localized into multiple languages for markets worldwide. Often the Japanese domestic version goes into more detail and mentions this or that technology as part of a product’s appeal. The non-Japan version focuses more on user benefits, oftentimes not even mentioning the technology that makes those benefits possible. Western thinking is, consumers want to acquire an experience, not a technology. Japanese thinking is, those promises feel more real when somehow linked to technology.

He has since tested his hypothesis in India, which also shows a clear divide in wheat and rice growing regions, with similar results. Almost all the people he questioned are not directly involved in farming, of course – but the historical traditions of their regions are still shaping their thinking. “There’s some inertia in the culture.”

The divide did not seem to correlate with measures of wealth or modernisation, but he noticed that one difference could be the kind of staple crop grown in the region: rice in most southern areas, and wheat in the north. “It splits almost neatly along the Yangtze River,” says Talhelm.Growing rice requires far greater cooperation: it is labour-intensive and requires complex irrigation systems spanning many different farms. Wheat farming, by contrast, takes about half the amount of work and depends on rainfall rather than irrigation, meaning that farmers don’t need to collaborate with their neighbours and can focus on tending their own crops. 

When questioned about their attitudes and behaviours, people in more individualistic, Western societies tend to value personal success over group achievement, which in turn is also associated with the need for greater self-esteem and the pursuit of personal happiness. But this thirst for self-validation also manifests in overconfidence, with many experiments showing that Weird participants are likely to overestimate their abilities. When asked about their competence, for instance, 94% of American professors claimed they were “better than average”.This tendency for self-inflation appears to be almost completely absent in a range of studies across East Asia; in fact, in some cases the participants were more likely to underestimate their abilities than to inflate their sense of self-worth. People living in individualistic societies may also put more emphasis on personal choice and freedom.

But why did the different thinking styles emerge in the first place? The obvious explanation would be that they simply reflect the prevailing philosophies that have come to prominence in each region over time. Nisbett points out that Western philosophers emphasised freedom and independence, whereas Eastern traditions like Taoism tended to focus on concepts of unity. Confucius, for instance, emphasised the “obligations that obtained between emperor and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother, and between friend and friend”. These diverse ways of viewing the world are embedded in the culture’s literature, education, and political institutions, so it is perhaps of little surprise that those ideas have been internalised, influencing some very basic psychological processes.

many Indians continue to defecate in the open. Bangladesh’s government and charities have built latrines, too, but they have worked harder to stigmatise open defecation. Often they install latrines for the poor and then prod richer folk into following their example. A new, surprising, finding is that this works better than expecting people to copy their social superiors.

use ‘本を貸していただけませんでしょうか’ to make it even politer.

‘本を貸してくださいませんか’ (Can’t you lend me your book?)

By asking questions, the listeners feel that they have a choice to say no and thus are not offended by your request. In Japanese, you should also ask questions when you ask for a favor.

when you ask the same people to do something FOR you, e.g. lend you a book or sign a recommendation letter for you, you can’t just use ください.

The group has long been internally divided by dilemma as to whether its striving upward, should be aimed at strengthening its inner cultural and group bonds, both for intrinsic progress and for offensive power against caste; or whether it should seek escape wherever and however possible into the surrounding American culture.

Cultural differences can be wonderfully subtle.  Consider this distinction: "Do not do unto others as you would not have them do to you" (Chinese Confucian).  This prohibits harmful acts. "Do unto others as you would wish them to do to you" (Judeo-Christian).  This promotes helpfulness.

Another dimension of culture that is relevant to health is the tendency to trust others: this is the notion of "social capital". Perhaps surprisingly, people from individualistic cultures tend to trust strangers more highly than do people from collectivistic cultures. In surveys that ask questions on agreement with statements such as “Most people can be trusted”, Nordic societies score highest, although China is also very high. Several Latin American countries and East Europe score low.

While it’s foolish to assign coherent political meaning to Rodriguez’s film, it cannot be denied that the machete is a powerful symbol of violent, popular revolt, a tool/weapon freighted with centuries of significance.

However, one thing remains constant: those who use it as a tool in their daily lives are also the most likely to turn to it as a weapon, because it is often the only option available to the slave, the peasant, or the proletariat within the agricultural regions of the tropics.

A story like Walker’s illustrates why the machete so well captures the problem of the tool vs. the weapon. This simple object is imbued with enormous symbolic political power, because its practical value can never be isolated from its violent potential.