Blog Blender

To praise Gen X

Amanda Fortini dives deep into the cultural relevance of Generation X. It’s lasting impacts to music, movies, books permeate the pop culture landscape.

Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade and a literature.” It’s a moment, a mood, an ethos and an enduring way of being, the hallmark characteristics of which — anticorporatism, anti-authoritarianism, ironic detachment, artistic independence, an existential horror of selling out and a live-and-let-live philosophy of life — feel like the antidote to a lot of what’s currently wrong in our culture.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

PJH Studios

Movies, music, books, whiskey, and culture in a blog blender

  • To praise Gen X

    Amanda Fortini dives deep into the cultural relevance of Generation X. It’s lasting impacts to music, movies, books permeate the pop culture landscape. Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology,…

  • Declining US birthrates

    There’s a hypothesis that there are environmental and biological reasons, for the decline in US birthrates. In a press release, the lead author of a recent meta-analysis suggested that among men in the U.S. with no known fertility challenges, “sperm counts are largely stable and haven’t changed significantly” in recent years. Moreover, it’s unclear whether…

  • Drunk raccoon

    A raccoon broke into a liquor store and passed out in the bathroom.

  • Self driving cars as a public health solution

    The science fiction idea of all traffic consisting of autonomous vehicles lowering traffic accidents, is nearing a reality. Waymo released intro of data documenting nearly 100,000,000 miles of cars driven, and the numbers show significant safety outcomes. The self-driving car company Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles in four American cities…

  • AI animation acceleration

    Disney is giving animators an AI tool to accelerate character animation. To maintain the “creator-first approach” that centers human artists — a hallmark of last century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney looked into “pretty much all of the AI companies.” “We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small,…

  • Detroit gets a Robocop statue

    A tweet in 2011 inspired a campaign for a statue of Robocop to be built in Detroit.

  • TV creative trees

    In sports, coaching trees are when assistants of preeminent coaches become good coaches, or well-known as well. What if we applied similar thinking to TV show runners and writers? The Ringer drafts a lists of shows whose writers or producers went onto create other successful shows.

  • When your car becomes a brick

    One of the frustrating things about modern life is when a device that requires software to work properly suddenly does not mean working properly, you essentially have a very expensive brick. Vehicles, that require gears, pistons, and all sorts of other mechanical bits and bobs–are also becoming very expensive bricks due to all of the…

  • The history of tarot

    Playing cards have been around for nearly 500 years, but their form as tarot cards has only been around since the mid 18th century. Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played…

  • How to colonize space according to archeologists

    Humanity traveled the world throughout its history, creating colonies and cities–for better or worse. If we are to travel through space to other planets, we might need to consider lessons from our past. Their paper, which is published in Acta Astronautica, uses island archaeology to outline eight different lessons that can impact the success of…