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Thursday, October 3rd, 2019

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    7:30a
    Is It Really Ever a Good Idea to Revive an Old TV Show? Pretty Much Pop #13 Considers

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is PMP-TV-Revivals-Revived-400-x-800.jpg

    An appalling number of shows are now being continued long after their deaths. Revivals (not to be confused with reboots) bring us back to the comfort of old friends, who are now really old. What can a revival's success tell us about why the show was appealing in the first place? Wouldn't you rather see a new work by the same creative team than more of the same? Mark, Erica, and Brian consider some successes, failures, and hypotheticals.

    We consider Arrested Development, The Twilight Zone, X-Files, Twin Peaks, Will & Grace, Deadwood, Full House, Gilmore Girls, Queer Eye, Doctor Who, Veronica Mars, and talk too much about The Brady Bunch and Alf.

    Some articles we looked at:

    This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

    Pretty Much Pop is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

    Is It Really Ever a Good Idea to Revive an Old TV Show? Pretty Much Pop #13 Considers is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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    8:00a
    1,600+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in October: Enroll Today

    FYI. 1,600+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are getting underway in October, giving you the chance to take free courses from top flight universities. With the help of Class Central, we've pulled together a complete list of October MOOCs. And below we've highlighted several courses that piqued our interest.

    Here's one tip to keep in mind: If you want to take a course for free, select the "Full Course, No Certificate" or "Audit" option when you enroll. If you would like an official certificate documenting that you have successfully completed the course, you will need to pay a fee.

    You can browse through the complete list of October MOOCs here.

    Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere.

    Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. 

    1,600+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in October: Enroll Today is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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    11:00a
    Novelist Cormac McCarthy Gives Writing Advice to Scientists … and Anyone Who Wants to Write Clear, Compelling Prose

    As we pointed out back in 2017, Cormac McCarthy, author of such gritty, blood-drenched novels as Blood Meridian, Child of God, The Road, and No Country for Old Men, prefers the company of scientists to fellow writers. Since the mid-nineties, he has maintained a desk at the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary scientific think tank, and has served as a volunteer copy-editor for several scientists, including Lisa Randall, Harvard’s first female tenured theoretical physicist, and physicist Geoffrey West, author of the popular science book Scale.

    One of McCarthy's first such academic collaborations came after a friend, economist W. Brian Arthur, mailed him an article in 1996. McCarthy helped Arthur completely revise it, which sent the editor of the Harvard Business Review into a “slight panic,” the economist remembers. I can’t imagine why, but then I’d rather read any of McCarthy’s novels than most academic papers. Not that I don’t love to be exposed to new ideas, but it’s all about the quality of the writing.

    [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<div [...] http://cdn8.openculture.com/>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

    <p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1032364" src="https://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/02/01000329/1000px-Cormac_McCarthy_signature-e1488355439405.png" alt="" width="320"/></p> <p>As we <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/how-cormac-mccarthy-became-a-copy-editor-for-scientific-books-and-one-of-the-most-influential-economic-articles-of-the-last-20-years.html">pointed out back in 2017</a>, Cormac McCarthy, author of such gritty, blood-drenched novels as <a href="https://amzn.to/2nMGKw3"><em>Blood Meridian</em></a>, <a href="https://amzn.to/2oFQ5FG"><em>Child of God</em></a>, <a href="https://amzn.to/2nVGH0Q"><em>The Road</em></a>, and <a href="https://amzn.to/2n1oMp0"><em>No Country for Old Men</em></a>, prefers the company of scientists to fellow writers. Since the mid-nineties, he has maintained a desk at the <a href="https://www.santafe.edu/">Santa Fe Institute</a>, an interdisciplinary scientific think tank, and has served as a volunteer copy-editor for several scientists, including <a href="https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall">Lisa Randall</a>, Harvard’s first female tenured theoretical physicist, and physicist Geoffrey West, author of the popular science book <a href="https://amzn.to/2pwmnU9"><em>Scale</em></a>.</p> <p>One of McCarthy's first such academic collaborations came after a friend, economist W. Brian Arthur, mailed him an article in 1996. McCarthy helped Arthur completely revise it, which sent the editor of the <a href="https://hbr.org/"><em>Harvard Business Review</em></a> into a “slight panic,” the economist remembers. I can’t imagine why, but then I’d rather read any of McCarthy’s novels than most academic papers. Not that I don’t love to be exposed to new ideas, but it’s all about the quality of the writing.</p> <div class="oc-center-da"http://cdn8.openculture.com/> <p>Scholarly writing has, after all, a reputation for obscurity, and obfuscation for a reason, and not only in postmodern philosophy. Scientific papers also rely heavily on jargon, overly long, incomprehensible sentences, and disciplinary formalities that can feel cold and alienating to the non-specialist. McCarthy identified these problems in the work of associates like biologist and ecologist Van Savage, who has “received invaluable editing advice from McCarthy,” notes <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5"><em>Nature</em></a>, “on several science papers published over the past 20 years.”</p> <p>During “lively weekly lunches” with the author during the winter of 2018, Savage discussed the finer points of McCarthy’s editing advice. Then Savage and evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh p<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5">resented the condensed version at <em>Nature</em> </a>for a wider audience. Below, we’ve excerpted some of the most striking of “McCarthy’s words of wisdom.” Find <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5">the complete compilation of McCarthy’s advice over at</a> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5"><em>Nature</em></a>.</p> <ul><li><em>Use minimalism to achieve clarity…. Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.</em></li> <li><em>Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember…. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.</em></li> <li><em>Limit each paragraph to a single message.</em></li> <li><em>Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct.</em></li> <li><em>Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly—it’s boring.</em></li> <li><em>Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant…. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section.</em></li> <li><em>Choose concrete language and examples.</em></li> <li><em>When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.</em></li> <li><em>Finally, try to write the best version of your paper—the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself.</em></li> <li><em>When you make your writing more lively and easier to understand, people will want to invest their time in reading your work.</em></li> </ul><p>As <a href="https://kottke.org/19/09/advice-from-cormac-mccarthy-on-writing-great-science-papers">Kottke points out</a>, “most of this is good advice for writing in general.” This is hardly a surprise given the source, though, as McCarthy’s primary body of work demonstrates, literary writers are free to tread all over these guidelines as long as they can get away with it. Still, his straightforward advice is an invitation for writers of all kinds—academic, popular, aspiring, and professional—to remind themselves of the fundamental principles of clear, compelling communicative prose.</p> <p><strong>Related Content:</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/how-cormac-mccarthy-became-a-copy-editor-for-scientific-books-and-one-of-the-most-influential-economic-articles-of-the-last-20-years.html">How Cormac McCarthy Became a Copy-Editor for Scientific Books and One of the Most Influential Articles in Economics</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html">Cormac McCarthy’s Three Punctuation Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/02/cormac-mccarthy-explains-why-he-worked-hard-at-not-working-how-9-to-5-jobs-limit-your-creative-potential.html">Cormac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Working: How 9-to-5 Jobs Limit Your Creative Potential</a></p> <p><em><a href="http://about.me/jonesjoshua">Josh Jones</a> is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/jdmagness">@jdmagness</a></em></p> &#13;<!-- permalink:http://www.openculture.com/2019/10/novelist-cormac-mccarthy-gives-writing-advice-to-scientists.html--><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.openculture.com/2019/10/novelist-cormac-mccarthy-gives-writing-advice-to-scientists.html">Novelist Cormac McCarthy Gives Writing Advice to Scientists … and Anyone Who Wants to Write Clear, Compelling Prose</a> is a post from: <a href="http://www.openculture.com">Open Culture</a>. Follow us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/openculture">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/openculture">Twitter</a>, and <a href="https://plus.google.com/108579751001953501160/posts">Google Plus</a>, or get our <a href="http://www.openculture.com/dailyemail">Daily Email</a>. And don't miss our big collections of <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses">Free Online Courses</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline">Free Online Movies</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks">Free eBooks</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks">Free Audio Books</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons">Free Foreign Language Lessons</a>, and <a href="http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses">MOOCs</a>.</p> <div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?a=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?a=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?i=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?a=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?i=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?a=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?a=Jel2EPBMzEQ:62ocHkXlUm4:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OpenCulture?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OpenCulture/~4/Jel2EPBMzEQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
    2:00p
    The Morals That Determine Whether We’re Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian

    An old friend once wrote a line I’ll never forget: “There are two kinds of people in the world, then there are infinitely many more.” It always comes to mind when I confront binary generalizations that I'm told define two equally opposing positions, but rarely capture, with any accuracy, the complexity and contrariness of human beings—even when said humans live inside the same country.

    Voting patterns, social media bubbles, and major network infotainment can make it seem like the U.S. is split in two, but it is split into, if not an infinity, then a plurality of disparate ideological dispositions. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there are two kinds of people. Let’s say the U.S. divides neatly into “liberals” and “conservatives.” What makes the difference between them? Fiscal policy? Education? Views on “law and order,” social welfare, science, religion, public versus private good? Yes, but….

    Best-selling NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt has controversially claimed that morality—based in emotion—really drives the wedge between competing “tribes” engaged in pitched us-versus-them war. The real contest is gut-level, mostly centered on disgust these days, one of the most primitive of emotional responses (we learn in the hand-drawn animation of a Haidt lecture below). Haidt argues that our sense of us and them is rooted, irrevocably, in our earliest cognitions of physical space.

    Haidt situates his analysis under the rubric of “moral foundations theory,” a school of thought “created by a group of social and cultural psychologists to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes.” Another moral foundations theorist, Peter Ditto, professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, uses his research to draw similar conclusions about “hyperpartisanship” in the U.S. According to Ditto, as he describes in the short video at the top, “morals influence if you’re liberal or conservative.”

    How? Ditto identifies five broad, universal moral categories, or “pillars,” that predict political thought and behavior: harm reduction, fairness, loyalty, authority/tradition, and purity. These concerns receive different weighting between self-identified liberals and conservatives in surveys, with liberals valuing harm reduction and fairness highly and generally overlooking the other three, and conservatives giving equal weight to all five (on paper at least). Ditto does step outside the binary in the last half of the segment, noting that his studies turned up a significant number of people who identified as libertarians.

    He takes a particular interest in this category. Libertarians, says Ditto, don’t rank any moral value highly, marking their worldview as “pragmatic” and strikingly amoral. They appear to be intensely self-focused and lacking in empathy. Other strains—from democratic socialism to anarchism to fascism—that define American politics today, go unmentioned, as if they didn’t exist, though they are arguably as influential as libertarianism in the strange flowerings of the American left and right, and inarguably as deserving of study.

    The idea that one's morals define one's politics doesn’t seem particularly novel, but the research of psychologists like Haidt and Ditto offers new ways to think about morality in public life. It also raises pertinent questions about the gulf between what people claim to value and what they actually, consistently, support, and about how the evolution of moral sensibilities seems to sort people into groups that also share historical identities, zip codes, and economic interests. Nor can we cannot discount the active shaping of public opinion through extra-moral means. Finally, in a two-party system, the options are as few as they can be. Political allegiance can be as much convenience, or reaction, as conviction. We might be right to suspect that any seeming political—or moral—unity on one side or the other could be an effect of amplified oversimplification.

    via Aeon

    Related Content:

    Yale’s Free Course on The Moral Foundations of Political Philosophy: Do Governments Deserve Our Allegiance, and When Should They Be Denied It?

    Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

    Do Ethicists Behave Any Better Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

    Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

    The Morals That Determine Whether We’re Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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