Fads.

We're talking about fads. It was my observation that the best fads were in the 1960s, but you might think that's a subjective perception caused by the fact that I was a teenager in the 60s. Correcting for that, the 1960s still wins in the competition among decades for best fads. Or so I assert, listing a bunch of great fads from the 60s off the top of my head: hula hoops, the twist, mini skirts, The Beatles, surfing, Afros, ironing your hair, long hair for males, love beads, happy faces.... surely there's more. I found this list of 60s fads on line. Bell-bottoms! Wide, paisley-patterned ties! Love-ins!

If you think some other decade can best the 60s in the fad category, make your case. But more generally, what do we think about fads? I was thinking that a certain type of fad — hula hoops — is a nice pop culture pastime. And then there is the labeling question: When does something stop being a fad? People use the word "fad" to put down something someone else thinks is important. Is blogging a fad? You might irritate some people by calling their pet concern a "fad": Worrying about the debt ceiling is a fad. Is there a time limit? Some new religion — Scientology — might be called a fad, but if you say "Christianity is a fad," people will know you are trying too hard to be provocative and — if they're smart — yawn.

Where did the word "fad" come from?

1834, "hobby, pet project;" 1881 as "fashion, craze," perhaps shortened from fiddle-faddle. Or perhaps from Fr. fadaise "trifle, nonsense," ultimately from L. fatuus "stupid."

Which reminds me: Fiddle Faddle is... a 60s fad! An even bigger popcorn-based 60s fad was Screaming Yellow Zonkers:

While the front of the package was simple and understated, the rest of the Zonkers box was completely covered with absurdist copy, accompanied by illustrations, informing the reader everything from “how to wash Zonkers” to “how to mate them”. The bottom of the box explained how to determine if it were indeed the bottom: “Open the top, and turn the box upside down. If the Zonkers fall out, this is the bottom. If they fall up, this is the top. If nothing happens, this box is empty.”

That was hilarious in the 60s, when smoking marijuana was also a fad.

"What Is the Most Significant Fad of All Time?"

Some excellent answers at this link (and one dumb one), but come up with your own answer before getting your channels of memory blocked up by seeing other people's answers. And don't read the next paragraph until you've done your own thinking.

One problem is defining "fad" — and that's complicated by seeing the word significant. It seems to me that a "fad" ought to be sort of insignificant. Otherwise the answer could be: War. Or: Religion. Or: Romantic love. If you take a narrow view of "fad" and restrict the category to things that really don't matter, you may go straight to the obvious American answers: the hula hoop, pet rocks, Cabbage Patch Dolls. I think it would be best to get somewhere in the middle, like 2 of the answers at the link: cigarettes and rock and roll.

Here's the OED definition for fad: "A crotchety rule of action; a peculiar notion as to the right way of doing something; a pet project, esp. of social or political reform, to which exaggerated importance is attributed; in wider sense, a crotchet, hobby, ‘craze.'" Hmm. Seems to exclude the things I put in the narrowest definition.

"In classic doublespeak, the Department of Energy explains that outlawing incandescent bulbs will 'empower consumers with lighting choices.'"

"Unless your choice is to buy the light bulb the government doesn't like. If Republicans can't understand the appeal of sparing Americans from the light bulb police, what are they good for?"

Let me attest to my hatred of fluorescent light by saying that this was the article that caused me — after all these years — to click through and subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.

And, here: Buy some 100-watt bulbs. You have until the end of the year to build up your lifetime stock of 100-watt bulbs. Unless Congress votes for the "Bulb Act" and repeals the loathsome law George W. Bush "signed in one of his all-too typical late-term decisions."

The ban passed at the height of the global warming fad-scare when all proper thinkers were supposed to sacrifice to the anticarbon gods.

Is the fad-scare over?!

You know if you put the argument for repeal like that, it's going to intimidate politicians who are still afraid of being labeled AGW deniers.

"Researchers are unsure... but theories include that it is a playful manifestation of the mammals’ curiosity, a social fad or..."

"... the intentional targeting of what they perceive as competitors for their favourite prey, the local bluefin tuna."

From "Yacht sinks after latest incident involving orcas in strait of Gibraltar/Vessel measuring 15 metres in length sank after encounter with the animals, Spain’s maritime rescue service reports" (The Guardian). 

Also: "Experts believe them to involve a subpopulation of about 15 individuals given the designation 'Gladis.'"

From last year in The Guardian: "The orca uprising: whales are ramming boats – but are they inspired by revenge, grief or memory?" That's a much more interesting article....

The streetcar boondoggle.

Randal O'Toole explains in detail. (PDF, via Forbes.) To put it briefly: Buses do better for far less money.

Streetcars are the latest urban planning fad, stimulated partly by the Obama administration’s preference for funding transportation projects that promote “livability” (meaning living without automobiles) rather than mobility or cost-effective transportation. Toward that end, the administration wants to eliminate cost-effectiveness requirements for federal transportation grants, instead allowing non-cost-effective grants for projects promoting so-called livability. In anticipation of this change, numerous cities are preparing to apply for federal funds to build streetcar lines....

Rail transit proponents rely heavily on a myth that many people will ride railcars who won’t ride buses. They use the term “quality transit” as a euphemism for rail transit, implying that buses are not quality transit. Apparently, “livability” not only means you don’t have to have a car, but you don’t have to lower yourself by taking a bus either. Taxpayers are supposed to cater to such snobs by providing them with rail alternatives that cost many times more than buses.

The "therapy" of exposing yourself to what is said to be a temperature of 200+ degrees below zero.

Cryotherapy — supposedly a fad amongst celebrities.

Starting our Monday off right! A little #risenation and #cryotherapy with this gem, @chaseweideman.

A photo posted by Mandy Moore (@mandymooremm) on Apr 20, 2015 at 11:34am PDT

"If any couple chooses to consummate their sexual cravings, then..."

"... that act becomes a total commitment with adherence to all consequences that may follow, except on certain exceptional considerations," said the judge.

“The wording in the judgment seems odd, but it’s a way of addressing the larger issue of rights of persons over one another when they are in such unions,” said Urvashi Butalia, a feminist writer and founder of Zubaan, a nonprofit publishing house.

“I think that the statement that couples who have sexual relations are to be considered married is a bit absurd,” she said. “It brings in a morality that should not be there.”...

[H]aving sex before marriage is still widely condemned in India. Last year, a Delhi High Court judge, as he imposed a jail sentence on a woman convicted of killing her live-in boyfriend, described such relations as a “fad” and an “infamous Western cultural product.”

"Try 'racial justice.'"

I wanted to search for an article at Vanity Fair, and the search box looked like this:

See the faint print in the box?

I thought it was funny, this idea to just "try" racial justice. The commitment to racial justice is obligatory, not something merely to "try."

This is the same problem I have with the song "Try a Little Tenderness." Just try... and if it doesn't work out for you, try something else? As Otis Redding sang the song — the one where the dress is "shaggy," rather than "shabby" — the tenderness you were supposed to try was "to rub her gentle" and "don't bruise her." And after you've tried that, what? 

In the old days of prominent Alka-Seltzer ads, the catchphrase was "Try it, you'll like it":

Despite all the feminism, we still get "Facial Exercises May Make You Look 3 Years Younger" in the NYT.

This reports on a study, published in JAMA Dermatology, that "began by getting in touch with Gary Sikorski of Providence, R.I., who had developed Happy Face Yoga, one of the longest-established facial-exercise programs." They got "27 women between the ages of 40 and 65" and taught elaborate exercises that took 30 minutes to complete and that they had to do every day for 8 weeks and then every other day for 12 weeks. 11 of the volunteers dropped out along the boring as hell way. The 16 who stuck it out spent about 50 hours on these face exercises. Then a bunch of doctors who were somehow experts on how young women look judged them to look 3 years younger than their actual age:

The researchers showed the photographs of these women to dermatologists who did not know them and asked the doctors to rate the appearance of various facial features on a standard numerical scale and also to estimate the women’s ages.

How do I know that the women who volunteered didn't already look younger than the stereotype these doctors happened to have in mind?! The exercises could just as well have made them look older than when they started. What kind of women will volunteer and also put up with 50 hours of this nonsense? Probably women who were taking great care of themselves and might very well have begun looking 10 years younger than their chronological age.

Fortunately, the commenters at the NYT lambaste the article. One points out that this was a fad 40 years ago — "Mrs. Craig's Face-Saving Exercises." For those who can put up with a little Woody Allen, this was the funniest thing in his 1980 movie "Stardust Memories":

"I think college admissions has really dipped into this fad of trauma dumping."

Said Rushil Umaretiya, who grew up in an Indian immigrant family and will be a freshman at the University of North Carolina.

Quoted in "After the Affirmative Action Ruling, Asian Americans Ask What Happens Next/No matter their views of race-conscious admissions, students were wary of the college application process — and some thought little would change" (NYT).

Umaretiya's observation is based on what he saw colleges and applicants doing before the Supreme Court's new decision came out. After the decision, there will be even more emphasis on the applicant's personal essay, and what can students do but tell the best story of their life as a victim of society?

Even before the decision, [Umaretiya] had seen anxious classmates at his selective high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., making up stories about facing racial injustice.

What's the difference between framing your life story in terms of victimhood and making up stories? Umaretiya says he saw — how did he see? — his own classmates making up stories. That's the NYT paraphrase. Who knows? Maybe every applicant is honest or no more dishonest than to pick a tale of woe out of context and describe it colorfully. But the heavy reliance on the personal essay as the new way to pursue racial diversity creates far too much temptation and strikes me as quite unfair to those who are scrupulously honest. But who cares? Honest people are all alike. You want diversity.

"Although [Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] has spawned thousands of worshipful articles and books, it remains for me, at best, like Pet Rocks—a fad."

"When I first wrote this, I received instant criticism from my editor and others: fads are short-lived, while enthusiasm for Kuhn’s book has persisted for half a century. And unlike Pet Rocks, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was never sold as a forting companion, a solution to urban loneliness in a post-industrial society. So not exactly Pet Rocks. Maybe what emerged was more of a cult. With Kuhn as leader, dispensing his own brand of pernicious intellectual Kool-Aid. (In John Milius’s 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian, a peddler tells Conan about the cult of Set: 'Two, three years ago, it was just another snake cult. Now you see it everywhere.')"

Writes Errol Morris in an excerpt from his book "The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality)."

The second link goes to Amazon, where you can pre-order the book (it comes out on the 22nd) and where it says: "In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result.... Morris wants to establish as clearly as possible what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of escape through philosophical evasions."

This is not just some oddity from Ottawa: Yoga really is a cultural appropriation problem.

Here's a story from Canada. At the University of Ottawa, the Centre for Students with Disabilities has decided to end its program of free yoga classes, because "there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice."

"Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced," and which cultures those practices "are being taken from." The centre official argues since many of those cultures "have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy ... we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga."

The Centre's prose is abstruse. The Ottawa Sun, reporting the controversy, offers some plainer English:

The concept of cultural appropriation is normally applied when a dominant culture borrows symbols of a marginalized culture for dubious reasons -- such as the fad of hipsters donning indigenous headdresses as a fashion statement, without any regard to cultural significance or stereotype.

Hipsters are donning headdresses? I hadn't noticed that, but fashion does typically grab and decontextualize ideas from other cultures. Have you ever seen the documentary "Unzipped," about the designer Isaac Mizrahi? Here's the scene where he's sitting in bed watching "Nanook of the North" and sketching ideas that end up in his next runway show. He's saying: "These Eskimos are inspiring. I can't even believe how beautiful these Eskimos are. And I love it. All the fur pants.... There's something very charming about a big, fat fur pant."

Now, what's wrong with the way Canadians and Americans have appropriated yoga, stripping it of its Indian religious context, taking just the amount of deeper meaning that's comfortable to the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd who feel the need to stretch their bodies a lot and their minds not too much?

The yoga teacher who was ousted in Ottawa says:

"People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find. There's a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon. And unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things."

The acting student federation president Romeo Ahimakin said the idea was not a permanent ban but a rethinking of the school's use of yoga "to make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces":

"We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner."

That strikes me as a moderate approach, not a ban, but a call for deeper reflection about something that is, in its origin, deep and that has been made shallow for the purposes of consumption by health-minded young people in stretch pants. A university should be a place of learning and a search for greater understanding. There is something wrong with presenting yoga as fun, lightweight, stress relief.

The yoga instructor, whose name is Jennifer Scharf, wanted to just relabel the class "mindful stretching," which, she said, would "literally change nothing." Well, literally, it would change something, the name. And if we are going to be "mindful," we might want to wonder what our mind is full of. Is it not some anodyne pastiche of Indian religion?

Scharf says: "I'm not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master, and the point (of the program) isn't to educate people on the finer points of the ancient yogi scripture." But that's what appropriation is. You're taking the parts that you like, that feel good to you, that are useful for your purposes, and leaving behind everything that's deep or uncomfortable or uninteresting to you. It's religion drained of religion.

It's fine to concoct your own spirituality using ingredients you've culled from existing religions, but if you're going to practice it in classes at a public university, you should be honest and reflective about what you are doing. And if the religion you're using for your source material comes from a culture that is foreign to you, you ought to spend some time on the stretching exercise of contemplating how what you are doing feels to those who belong to that culture.

"And the gender dynamics — male economists piling on against a female economist and a female journalist, Times' reporter Jeanna Smialek, in ways distinctive from typical academic arguments — look terrible here."

Writes Emily Peck at Axios in "Male economists are freaking out over a NYT profile." 

You may remember I talked yesterday about that NYT article and the reaction to it and said "my feminist alarm went off," so I'm interested in Peck's discussion.

More from Peck:

“I am sorry to see the @nytimes taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement. It is the equivalent of publicizing fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories,” [Larry] Summers tweeted. ...

Noah Smith, a well-known economist and former Bloomberg columnist... calls the Times profile a "puff piece," noting that Smialek writes about Kelton's outfits. The phrase puff piece wasn't much used back when Summers was credited with saving the world from an economic meltdown on the cover of Time magazine in 1999, Mark Paul, an economics professor at New College of Florida, tells Axios.

Teaching self-esteem and diversity.

From a review of "NurtureShock," by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman:

[H]igh self-esteem doesn't improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, deter alcohol drinking or do much of anything good for kids. In fact, telling kids how smart they are can be counterproductive. Many children who are convinced that they are little geniuses tend not to put much effort into their work. Others are troubled by the latent anxiety of adults who feel it necessary to praise them constantly.

... [A] lot of well-meaning adult nostrums—"we're all friends," "we're all equal"—pass right over the heads of young children. Attempts to increase racial sensitivity in older students can even lead to unintended consequences. One ­researcher found that "more diversity translates into more divisions between students." Another warns that too much discussion of past discrimination can make minority children over-reactive to perceived future slights. As for trying to increase emotional intelligence, the education fad of the 1990s, it doesn't seem to promote "pro-social values" either. It turns out that bullies use their considerable EQ, as it is called, to ­control their peers.

Was Louisa May Alcott a trans man?

Peyton Thomas — host of "Jo’s Boys: A Little Women Podcast" — looks at the evidence in a NYT op-ed.

Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And: 

"There’s always two poles in any movement. There’s this pull toward being post-human, shinier, newer, cloned, etc., the sense that people have elevated the lacquered surface of the machine over the body."

"[And there's this pull toward] I’m real. I think we’re like old stone houses. We have the value of antiquity. If you haven’t tweaked yourself, it’s like you have a working fireplace that’s been going since 1680. We’re authentic.... For all women, there’s that line between choosing to be malleable and pleasing and to conform with the collective norms or refusing it.... No, I’m not playing that game."

Said the 77-year-old French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, quoted in "Why Fashion Suddenly Loves Older Women/Representation of women of a certain age has never been higher. What’s going on?" (NYT).

The article is by Vanessa Friedman, who continues: "Authenticity is, of course, one of the current buzzwords not just in fashion, but in culture generally. It’s a reflection of the fear that individual style has been lost to the algorithm.... It’s not just influencers and celebrities who have become the vehicles for this version of ageless sameness. It’s political figures, too.... As many MAGA women have embraced the plumped and smoothed 'Mar-a-Lago face,' it has become an expression of a larger social swing toward exaggerated norms and old-fashioned patriarchal gender roles rather than simply a cosmetic fad."

"Her art comes to life by oxidization. Just like apples, bananas oxidize, or turn brown, as the enzymes in their cells are released and interact with the oxygen in the air."

"Cells that are damaged — because they’ve been poked with a fork or dropped on the floor — brown faster. By varying when she applied the marks, Chojnicka discovered that she could create a palette of shades, resulting in surprisingly intricate pictures." 

From "Bored in the pandemic, she made art by bruising bananas. Now she has an international following" (WaPo), which is all about this Instagram feed. It's not high art. It's stuff like this:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Banana Bruiser (@banana_bruiser)

 

Yes, that gets you an article in The Washington Post these days. Got to keep up with the fads. Speaking of fads, bananas, and "high art," remember the 60s fad of getting high from banana skins and wondering if "Mellow Yellow" was about that? 

Ah, yes, here — Atlas Obscura has an article about it: "Smoking Banana Peels Is the Greatest Drug Hoax of All Time/They called it mellow yellow" ("Donovan would later state definitively that the song was actually written about a yellow vibrator...").

ADDED: I was curious about my use of the word "skins" — "banana skins" — instead of the more normal "banana peels." What came over me? I googled and was very amused to see that "Banana peel" has its own Wikipedia page. It's not just a subsection under "Banana." 

Anyway, there I learn that "banana skins" is the British term. The subsections with the "Banana peels" article are: "Uses," "Culinary Uses," "In a comical context," "Peeling methods," and "Psychoactive effects of banana peels." Under the "comical" heading, we get the serious science of why banana peels provide such a slippery surface:

The coefficient of friction of banana peel on a linoleum surface was measured at just 0.07, about half that of lubricated metal on metal. Researchers attribute this to the crushing of the natural polysaccharide follicular gel, releasing a homogenous sol.

*** 

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"The convention is one of the many ways that monks around the country are working to demonstrate the modern relevance of a religion that some young people see as old fashioned, esoteric and..."

"... relegated to secluded mountaintop temples.... ... Buddhism faces a particularly steep challenge in South Korea, where Protestantism, a branch of Christianity, overtook it to become the most popular religion for the first time in the latest census. In South Korea and some other Asian countries, Christianity tends to be associated with modernity and rationality, while Buddhism and folk religions are often seen as more old-fashioned, Professor Chia said. Some young people at the Busan expo said they were trying to shake that idea. South Koreans tend to see the religion as one that is for older people and can only be encountered at 'temples deep in the mountains,' said Ju Yeo-jin, 30, a vendor selling casual streetwear style clothing and accessories, wearing a pageboy cap over her short bleached hair. 'The Buddhism I’ve experienced is fun and cool. I want to convey that feeling.'"

I'm reading "Is South Korea’s 'Buddhistcore' Aesthetic a Fad or a Spiritual Awakening? Young South Koreans are buying Buddhist merch. Monks and experts hope the buzz will translate into deeper engagement" (NYT).

I think Americans associate Buddhism with modernity and rationality — but not because of expos and "merch"! To me, it seems modern and rational to retreat to a temple deep in the mountains. Maybe to young people the religion of one's own region will always seem "old-fashioned" and based in tradition. Just imagine people from elsewhere looking over and perhaps it will seem newly modern. Or what the hell, buy a "red heart-shaped magnet reading, 'Sentient beings I love you'" or "key chains of the Buddha in neon and with hearts for eyes, and streetwear-style T-shirts with slogans like 'Shut up and meditate.'" Maybe that will work.

"And yeah, I hear that she wants to now engage in more multidimensional storytelling."

"Versus, I guess, just the straight-on reading-into-that-teleprompter-screen storytelling. So more power to her. I wish her well with her multidimensional storytelling."

Sarah Palin mocks her nemesis Katie Couric.

Multidimensional storytelling is an expression that lends itself to comic riffing. Palin's jab isn't particularly clever. It's mainly just the sarcastic repeating of Couric's own term. How did the term "storytelling" catch on over the last quarter century as a positive way to talk about narration of real-world events? If I remember correctly, before about 1980, the term "storytelling" mainly referred to fiction or lying.

There was a real fad in the legal academy for writing and pontificating about "telling stories" about this or that aspect of law, and it was meant in a positive way. I hate to pick on an individual lawprof, but here's an example of what I'm talking about from a recent law review article:

Narratives matter, place matters, and care's embrace of storytelling situates law in a more robust dialogue on the allocation of rights to controlling our surroundings.

Like most law review article sentences, it has a footnote:

"Manba involves devotees wearing dark tans, white make-up around their eyes and hair that is often a combination of neon colours."

A Japanese fad moves to Britain.

It has been around for nearly a decade and is an eye-catching statement against conformity....

Do not attempt this look in the United States.

They start their routine by applying self tan to their bodies.

Eilish rubs the self tan on her neck but her face is darkened much more heavily.

She smears the coffee-bean powder on her pale skin and tries to rub it in so that it does not look "patchy".

Declan explains that he buys his foundation from Afro-Caribbean shops as normal shops do not sell powders that are dark enough....

They then use... white marker pens to create big eyes... and white lipstick.

Uh, Declan... Eilish... you're wearing blackface!

Declan and Eilish say they have been accused of racism for darkening their skin in this way, but they say this could not be further from the truth.

Eilish insists that she is "not mocking anybody" and Declan asks, "what black person looks like this?"...

The British followers of this Japanese subculture are also into the music, which is called Eurobeat, and practise dance moves called Para-Para.

If you're wondering what kind of music and dancing is favored by people this... dumb, there's video at the link.