60 Minutes hits the high points about the excitement The Savannah Bananas and their style of baseball is bringing to the sport. Athletic, Globetrooter-esque plays, stilts, and innovation to the rules.
Category: Pop Culture
Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people
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The Smithsonian and what is history
The nation’s museum, The Smithsonian, becomes another front in the war on truth.
But even as the social history approach remade American museums, most Americans cling to an understanding of history that prioritizes the very things the social historians criticized. According to a 2021 survey of attitudes to history, conducted by researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the American Historical Association, the vast majority of Americans view history fundamentally differently than historians do. History, for about 70 percent of Americans, is simply what we remember about the past, especially names, dates and other facts. It isn’t, as most professional historians believe, the interpretation of those facts that constitutes history.
“We were always trying to get people to think, ‘What is history?’” Gardner says. “The goal was to think about meaning and perspectives.”
So, there is a paradox: Americans consume and enjoy social history on a daily basis, in museums, books and documentaries, but if asked to define history, they would give an account that sounds more like the rote lessons and recitations of fact that their grandparents and great-grandparents found tedious and boring decades ago.
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Harry Potter and the Problematic Author
Maia Kobabe illustrates the issues around Harry Potter’s author, J.K. Rowling. All that fame and fortune, and backing transphobia is what she decides to do.
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The story of Oregon Trail, the game
If you went to school in the 80s and 90s, you most likely played the game Oregon Trail. It influenced video gaming in numerous ways, such as naming your companion characters.
Fifty years after it was created, The Oregon Trail’s legacy remains powerful and, in many ways, surprising. Hundreds of millions of players have attempted the journey – though most never make it to Oregon. The phrase “You have died of dysentery”, a common end for voyagers, has spawned t-shirts and countless memes in its wake. The quote is even referenced in a bestselling 2022 novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, about an age bracket of Americans she calls “The Oregon Trail Generation“. The game has also seen dozens of sequels, spinoffs and parodies, and now an upcoming live-action movie.
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Who gets to participate in fandoms?
In 2020, fandom thrived. We saw people return to their old fandom favorites like Twilight or Sherlock, play so much Animal Crossing and The Sims, and fall down the BTS rabbit hole (leading the group to their first no. 1 song in “Dynamite”). Escapism has literally kept people going despite all kinds of crises, and the use of fandom as a solace will likely only continue now that we’re in 2021 and still awaiting easy access to vaccination. It allows people a reprieve, to bury their heads in the sand and pretend for a little while longer that everything isn’t so terrible.
Which is great… to an extent. But all experiences of escapism are not created equally. Escapism isn’t actually possible for everyone because of the nature of both fandom and the world around us. The best-worst example of the limits of fandom escapism? Racism.
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Vehicles shaped like food
Would you drive an almond, a hot dog, or a potato?
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368 Chickens
368 Chickens is a deceptively simple, addicting tile matching game. In a 6×6 grid, you attempt to create matches of three or more of four different chickens. My best score in 71.
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Cheap consumer goods defeated communism
Amanda Mull makes the case that post WWII style capitalism with affordable consumer goods defeated communism. And for the better part of the last 60 to 70 years helped American companies maintain that power. The tarriff war will likely end that.
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Improvising a band concert
I’m a firm believer most people are good people. After Trump canceled a concert performance for a diverse group of high schoolers, military band members rallied and helped 22 of those students put on the performance.
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2025 Barkley Marathon
The Barkley Marathon is a unique and rugged ultramarathon. After 5 people completed the race last year, the race was made more difficult.