Meaning talk in the lofty sense serves as laudatory gloss on behaviours one or one’s community is anyway disposed to practice and encourage. This explains both why meaning making is an inside job requiring personal negotiation between individuals’ and society’s abilities and constraints, and why one man’s meaning tends not to mean quite the same thing to everyone.
You can hardly blame people for misunderstanding Britney and misconstruing her circumstances, but after the memoir it is all the harder to ignore their casual commentarial cruelty. Reports about Britney getting snapped partying panty-less with and without Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, marrying a childhood friend for a day, having a public meltdown and shaving her head for no clear reason made it really easy to conclude she was troubled if not severely mentally ill. Like a hit song taking on a life all its own, its words no longer restricted to the original text, scenes from her life constructed out of page three news and celebrity gossip columns took on the complexion of something very like but also much more narratively persuasive—simpler—than the life itself. For those used to construing everything Britney has said and done before, during, and after the thirteen years she spent under an exploitative conservatorship overseen by her ghoulish father Jamie Spears as being conditioned by her mental instability or personality flaws her memoir comes like a thief in the night.
What's it now?If I were to begin a review of a motivational book in keeping with the tone and compositional principle of the work I would begin by quoting a…
There are 250 extant owl species known today though there is fossil evidence for a hundred species that have come and gone. Surprisingly, scientists keep finding new species and the…
Many people who believe in ghosts tend to outright disbelieve in the existence of cryptids, and aliens (Ch. 10). From a scientific point of view the existence of alien life seems vastly more probably than that of ghosts. If you believe in ghosts you can do worse than believing in Bigfoot. Not even Bruni wants you to believe everything you read, but reading about improbable things that just might be true is just plain good sense.
"Focusing on iconic dishes from Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca, and Istanbul von Bremzen attempts to bring light rather than the usual heat to the concept of a national dish in a globalized world where surprisingly nationalism is resurgent. She doesn’t to her credit pretend that stories about a few dishes from six countries provide a comprehensive account of the productive tension between national and world cuisine, although a sequel covering other national cuisines is acknowledged as a live possibility. A first principles approach to the question of theorising the national dish shows even a book covering every existing national cuisine is not up to the task. This is because—as von Bremzen acknowledges—the constitutive concepts of nation and national culinary identity are themselves of recent vintage and subject to ongoing negotiation; they are open to influence from actors at home and abroad."
Marcus du Sautoy talks about mathematics as the art of the shortcut, promoting his latest book at the Jaipur Literature Festival Toronto 2021.