When girls are in groups, they form coalitions of best friends, two against two, or two in edgy harmony with two. A girl in a group of girls who doesn’t feel that she has a specific ally feels at risk, threatened, frightened. - Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier
I recently spent a couple of hours watching Saturday morning cartoons from the 70s and 80s with a bunch of strangers. A local group (in Vancouver) puts on cartoon parties every few months. They show period commercials and PSAs in between cartoons, and have trivia contests. They sell plastic bowls of sugary cereal (one dollar discount if you bring your own bowl). The emphasis is on fun and nostalgia. But watching a program when you’re not part of the target audience - even if you once were - is hugely educational. Any work of art that finds an audience says something about that audience - their priorities, their values. And the episode of Jem they showed that day slid quite neatly into a few things I’ve been reading about feminine psychology.
In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: “dentistry” - PJ O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World
This article is a sort of round-up of passages from various writers to the effect that things are better now - at least in some important ways - than they used to be.
Dr. Gabor Mate (pronounced “Ma-tay”) is a Vancouver based physician, author and speaker. His newest book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts looks at the roots and ramifications of addiction (and not just to illicit substances). He approaches the subject from multiple angles, showing that addiction originates and plays out in personal feelings and experiences, body chemistry, societal structure and cultural attitudes. And what do you know, these angles quite neatly correspond with the four quadrants Ken Wilber’s mapped out as a major tenet of Integral Philosophy.
“...when we get among masterpieces, we find that (the protagonist) tends to become no more than a function of his environment, a convenient symbol for representing and explaining that environment.” - HL Mencken
