March 13, 2009
Unfinished theses
The Romanticizing of Motherhood: how men are being shut off from equality in parenting by self defeating pseudo-feminism.
inspired by: essay about breastfeeding in the Atlantic and all the feminist movements who strive to accentuate the differences between the sexes rather than what binds us together. And a conference I once attended where the chief apron wearing person of the Portuguese Freemasonry (I forget the title) said women weren't allowed in because they already contained in themselves the secret of life (undervaluing semen is fair game when it comes to prejudice).
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The animistic stockbroker: how the stock market is fueled by superstition disguised as statistics and by the need for symbolic milestones to transmogrify a Bear into a Bull.
inspired by: stocks soar as Maddoff pleads guilty and, as some financial news agency put it, "marking the end of a negative cycle". Also, the superbowl indicator, irrational fear of the month of October, "Madoff rally", "Obama bear market", etc, etc.
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Analyzing the contemporary Portuguese essay: is the lack of writers who actually get to the point an exercise of subtlety as a narrative style or is it a historical product of repression?
inspired by: reading an article in a portuguese magazine from 1968 and realizing that the subtle allusions, use of irony and noncommittal about anything, essential for it to clear the censorship office, made the piece completely unreadable. Which pretty much describes a big chunk of opinion pieces in newspapers these days, minus the censorship office. The thesis should be inconclusive and vague.
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Hacking Ecclesiastes: keeping God out of Epicureanism.
inspired by: reading that some think the pious, ominous bits were introduced by an editor to compensate for the continual doubt about the fairness of God's justice and appeals to joy, making it look like it was written by a very confused person.
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The end of the football club: how eventually supporters as emotional stakeholders will realize they are not supporting the team but cheering for a publicly traded company. It's just as ridiculous as wishing that Bayer will have bigger profits than Merck when you're not even a shareholder but only someone who is hooked on aspirin.
inspired by: one of the best bits of sports journalism I've seen in a long time. The need for sponsorship is having ridiculous outcomes. The football stadiums are named after insurance companies rather than named after great players (and then in smaller print, "sponsored by company X", as decency would have it) but some might argue that it's all business after all. Which leads to my pet hate of that thing Tate Modern calls the Unilever series. I swear the first time I saw it, it meant they were selling ice creams and detergents in the Turbine Hall. And I suppose I was right.
Posted by claudia
Comments
Posted by matt at March 15, 2009 05:15 PM