June 2009

Love and the Fear of Death

by Ben Atlas on 06.30.2009.7:48am · 0 comments

Mindhacks – Love and the Terror Management Theory:

“The theory suggests we have various ways of keeping the fear of death out of our conscious mind, and of understanding what makes our life meaningful.

Traditionally, researchers have focused on the effect of a social element – how we feel we fit in to our culture’s ideas about what makes a meaningful life, and a personal element – how we feel about ourselves, but more recently psychologists have been focusing on love as one of the most important ways of managing our existential fears.

Love beyond life is a constant poetic theme, and yet these are not simply poetic theories, they have been drawn from empirical research.

Never afraid to strip the poetry from the profound, cognitive scientists have labelled their most important existential paradigm “mortality salience”.

I already published Professor’s Louis Levy immortal speech on love in Crimes and Misdemeanors. In the concluding scene of the movie Professor Louis Levy speaks more directly about the fear. ►click to continue

LIFE of Djerba Jews in Tunisia – Part 1

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2009.10:30pm · 28 comments

LIFE Magazine photographer Frank Scherschel took a series photographs of Jews in Tunisia. There is no date next to the photos and I couldn’t find for sure when they photos where taken. I have seen some inconclusive dates online and I assume the photos were taken in 1955. I also assume that this is the famous island Djerba. If you have better information please let me know. There are about 70 photographs (more than 100 photos in the LIFE database). I am publishing them in two posts.

jewsintunisia23 ►click to continue

LIFE of Djerba Jews in Tunisia – Part 2

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2009.10:21pm · 18 comments

LIFE Magazine photographer Frank Scherschel took a series photographs of Jews in Tunisia. (Part 1 is here.)

As look at these photos I am overwhelmed with the beauty of this tribe. Perhaps it’s an island thing, Djerba being an island. Like Manhattan the confines created a microcosm. By you can see that these people lived intensely relating to others and the power of this community still drives the descendants, decades later in the cosmopolitan Paris or Tel Aviv. This very quality of our existence that we crave so much in the unconnected world.

jewsintunisia67 ►click to continue

Meet Beth Sholom in San Francisco

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2009.2:44pm · 6 comments

Hi, my name is Beth Sholom Synagogue. I was designed by Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects, the pretty pictures were taken by Rien van Rijthoven & Bruce Damonte and there is a story about me at ArchDaily. Let me tell you about myself.

bethsholom26

I live on the corner of a San Francisco Street. I have not friends on the block, I am not sure why, perhaps they don’t know that I am really beautiful on the inside. ►click to continue

Pot Dopamine Theory is up in Smoke

by Ben Atlas on 06.28.2009.9:26am · 0 comments

The use Marijuana increases chances for developing a psychosis. It was attributed to the increased dopamine levels after the use of cannabis. A new study argues there is no connection between dopamine levels in striatum and cannabis. The study doesn’t contend the psychosis statistics, suggesting there must be a different trigger – mindhacks.

They should look into possibilty that psychosis is a precondition for being a pot head and not visa versa.

Megachurch and the American Corporation

by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2009.8:21pm · 0 comments

Tracing the parallel histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex.  Joseph Clarke – Triple Canopy – Infrastructure for the Souls:

“FOR THESE DUAL INSTITUTIONS to minister effectively to suburbanites, they would have to be subdivided; they would have to adopt organizational and spatial frameworks capable of reducing their perceived size and conveying their appreciation for the individuality of workers and worshipers. In 1968, David Yonggi Cho, pastor of Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, restructured his ten-thousand-person congregation by dividing the city of Seoul into small groups, or “cells,” that would each meet on a weekday in a member’s home. Members were encouraged to invite their friends, and when a group reached a certain size, it would undergo what Cho called “cell division.” Within a decade, the church was the world’s largest, with two hundred thousand members. The cellular model quickly migrated to the US, where it fostered a new breed of churches.

They began pushing Bible-study groups, teen groups, young-professionals groups, single-parents groups, addiction-recovery groups, motorcycle-enthusiasts groups, bowling groups, and ballroom-dancing groups. The church experience no longer revolved around the Sunday service.

That same year, the Herman Miller furniture company created the “Action Office,” the forebear of the modern cubicle system. It has since sold five billion dollars’ worth of “systems furniture.” Businesses loved cubicles because they enjoyed favorable tax status as compared with conventional enclosed offices. Workers would love cubicles too, the theory went, because the structures would provide them with personal space while promoting communication and collaboration.”

So this thing stared in 1968, hmm… The idea of a cubicle, besides the obvious economic and spatial advantage, is to have an illusion of privacy, a wall to hang the hideous family pictures to remind that your suffering has a purpose, while every word and move is connected, controlled and sacrificed to the corporate plate.

Al Green – For the Good Times

by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2009.6:47pm · 0 comments

1972 version, behold the legend! ►click to continue

Is the Resumé Obsolete?

by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2009.12:50am · 0 comments

resumeAn interesting post on eduFire. Koichi writes: “once my generation takes over, the resumé is over – here are ten reasons why.”

All great points, there are drastic changes afoot, yes in education and the path of our employment. I agree that a resumé is mostly a waste of time. The ease of email blasting further diminishes the value of the document and the HR departments no longer distinguish between a spam and a job applications. The post indusial world is nonlinear and that makes the essential task of comparing one resume to the other virtually impossible. The nonlinear part is going to accelerate rapidly, the nominal educational and work related benchmarks will move past the current canonical standards.

There is also a built in fundament flaw in the resumé format. No only it’s awkward to write your own promo but it’s the least trustworthy communication, especially when a person is “100% honest about herself”. Often people who make a living teaching how to write resumés recognize the flaw and try to tell you that it’s all about a cover letter. I find this puzzling. In order to write a genuine cover letter one needs to know a lot about a company and also about a person who will be reviewing the resumé and the cover letter. Even with the well documented companies it’s virtually impossible to write a focused and targeted cover letter BEFORE an interview. The result of this is that most cover letters are generic templates stringing clichés, which makes them even more useless than the resumé itself. The question remains, if there will be any formal introductory document in the future?

Illustration via Irina Blok

LIFE in the Kutno Ghetto

by Ben Atlas on 06.26.2009.10:38pm · 42 comments

Kutno is a town in Poland to the north of Lodz and west of Warsaw. The color photos taken by Hugo Jaeger during October of 1939 inside the Kutno Ghetto (Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939).

kutnoghetto8 ►click to continue

Rex Optimus Popularis

by Ben Atlas on 06.26.2009.8:38pm · 0 comments

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Dieline – King of Pop:

“Los Angeles based artist – “I am excited to share this idea with the folks at Pepsi as either an art piece to compliment their vast collection within the Pepsico headquarters or as a limited edition run of cans leading up to Michael Jackson’s funeral. Not as a money making idea but as a way of expressing the power of icons and the art of a big idea.”

Palimpsest Restarchitektur Reminiscence

by Ben Atlas on 06.26.2009.8:42am · 0 comments

The photograph by Marcus Buck from Restarchitektur, viewable via Freie Arbeiten on his website. (via swissmiss / via pruned)

The Cocoon of Status Updates

by Ben Atlas on 06.23.2009.10:57pm · 0 comments

WSJ – Julia Angwin – How Are You? No, How Are You Really?

“So I decided to do a little investigative reporting on the authenticity of the updates I was receiving from my friends and family. I called a friend I hadn’t spoken to in awhile but whose tweets were a sunny mix of professional observations. His voice sounded depressed, so I asked how he was doing. “It’s been a pretty dark time,” he admitted.

Then I called my mom. Her garden was doing fine, but she was really upset about a friend’s illness – about which she had not tweeted. So far, not so good.

Finally, I called my friend from college, Chris Costello. I asked him to catch me up on how he was doing – so I could compare his narrative with what I thought I knew from his tweets.

It turns out that I had the basic outlines of his life correct – but I hadn’t grasped the gravity of his situation. He had been in the midst of buying a condo when he lost his job, causing his mortgage to fall through. Since he had already committed to leaving his apartment, he had to scramble to find a place to live in just three weeks.

His tweets, which he admitted were “oblique,” hadn’t explained his sudden move, or the link between his lost job and lost apartment. His updates were focused on the day-to-day hassles of moving.

I felt foolish and naive for being lulled into a sense of complacency by digital small talk. I mistook his updates about the struggles of moving and unemployment for true candor. I had allowed myself to think that I didn’t need to ask Chris that simple question that defines small talk: “How are you?”

It’s not that digital small talk is deceitful (although some probably is). Rather, it creates a cocoon of information that may not paint a full picture of the truth.

I still find it reassuring to read my daily feed of status updates from friends and family. But next time I talk to my online friends, I plan to ask: “How are you, really?”

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