PJH Studios

Category: Pop Culture

Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people

  • Ukraine also fighting the media war

    After Ukraine bombed Russia, images and other media of its success proliferated online. And that’s part of the war.

    Within just hours, three videos of the strike spread from Ukraine’s federal security agency to a journalist based in the country, later spilling into social media and news outlets worldwide. The videos appear to be filmed from the perspective of a drone, complete with an overlay of information about the drone’s telemetry.

    In one video, the drone flies over an airfield, passing clouds of dark gray smoke billowing from multiple warplanes. Another clip apparently captures the moment a plane explodes into a tower of flames. The third shows a drone descending toward an aircraft, with the video suddenly freezing and displaying the message “Warning no data” upon reaching the plane.

  • Puzzmo

    Puzzmo offers a collection of casual puzzle games from the traditional crossword, a fresh take on sudoku, or a clever incarnation of poker. It offers leader boards and groups to challenge friends.

    puzzmo homepage

  • Reconnecting with friends

    Once you hit a certain age, life accumulates, and staying in touch with friends becomes a challenge. Here are a few tips to reconnect with friends you’ve grown apart from.

  • Publishing newspapers at 15

    A group of teenagers are publishing their own weekly newspaper in Montauk, NY.

    Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.

    He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.

    “We still haven’t done hot dogs,” Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.

    The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.

  • Exporting the Irish Pub

    There’s an entire business devoted to exporting the Irish pub vibe.

    But founder Mel McNally is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.

    The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages.

  • How the Trump Administration is breaking the government

    A collective of writers have put together a website documenting how the Trump Administration is breaking the government. It’s detailed, concise, and well sourced.

  • DoorDash driver sparks security alert at major airport after entering ‘unauthorized’ area

    DoorDash driver sparks security alert at major airport after entering ‘unauthorized’ area.

    Despite the strict rules at the Chicago airport pickup and drop-off areas, the delivery person entered the secured areas before a worker realized he wasn’t supposed to be there.

    According to the outlet, a source noted that the driver drove miles along the interior and restricted roads at the airport and possibly even crossed runways — before someone in the air traffic control tower saw him.

    It shouldn’t be this easy to *potentially* do terrorism.

  • Librarians resist

    Leave it to the pedantic superpowers of librarians to force laws to be followed.

  • Maycember

    May has always been a busy month, at least in American culture. It’s gotten to the point the hubbub of Spring, Mothers Day, graduation, sports, festival, et al now commands its own term–Maycember.

    Much like the month of December, my packed calendar at the end of the school year has left me feeling like there’s not so much joy, as obligation and overwhelm. Instead of cruising into summer with a sense of relief, I’m sweating my way to the finish line—and possibly crying and stress snacking at certain points, too.

    It’s hard to relish in the moments and milestones when your to-do list is longer than your kids’ Christmas lists. I’m always thinking about the next function I have to attend, or person to  remember to call, or thing to book, or buy.

  • A letter to RFK Jr

    Anais Godard wrote “An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy“. The whole thing is quotable, and its strength lies in its astute lyricism.