Do Relationships Need to be Entertaining?

April 13, 2010

Our society’s fascination with stimulating experiences of entertainment—3D movie spectaculars, glamorous celebrities, fat-and-sugar enhanced food, etc.—has a few downsides. One of them is that experiences that aren’t entertaining no longer seem very compelling.

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Sports and the Logic of Entertainment

April 5, 2010

As our society values sports more and more as entertainment, we invest less and less in institutions that simply promote sports participation.

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The mysterious death of playing outside

March 25, 2010

A few weeks ago I flew to Denver with my younger daughter so that she could participate in a volleyball tournament; she has been travelling to tournaments for the last two years but this is the first time we had to fly. My daughter is 11 years old.

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Do Role-Players Confuse Fantasy and Reality?

March 20, 2010

People who participate in role-playing games take up positions in the fictional worlds of these games and think, speak and even feel from those imaginary positions. And this is the same thing that the rest of us do when we get caught up in a game or a novel.

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Is Entertainment Bad for You?

March 13, 2010

We need to better understand the culture of entertainment or we will fall under the control of its powerful effects.

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Fundamentalism: The flip side of the modern

March 5, 2010

Fundamentalism rejects the modern, but it cannot exist without the modern

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The Birth of Cultural Relativism

February 22, 2010

Cultural relativism arose in conjunction with contemporary consumer society. Today, arguments over the limits of moral flexibility are an increasingly important part of national and international politics.

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The Strange History of Edward Bernays

February 13, 2010

In my most recent post, I argued that two institutions that today seem utterly unconnected—psychotherapy and advertising—in fact share some intriguing historical connections. And none of these connections is more intriguing than the life of the American who is often known as “the father of public relations,” Edward Bernays. The place where it starts getting [...]

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Advertising, Entertainment, and…Psychotherapy?

February 7, 2010

There were some significant changes in norms and values in American culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These changes prepared the way both for today’s culture of advertising and entertainment, and today’s psychotherapies.

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The Avatar Audience

January 31, 2010

Why do we not attempt to realize in our real lives what we admire in fictions?

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