—Lawrence Block, via SwissMiss

It’s well-known that Luther trans­lated the Bible into Ger­man, and it’s often thought that he was the first one to do so. But that’s not true at all. In fact, there were 17—that’s right, 17—other trans­la­tions of the Bible into Ger­man before Luther’s! . . .

Gutenberg’s Bible was the first book printed in the West using mov­able type. But while the tech­nol­ogy was new, the social sys­tem was still old. We have in the Guten­berg Bible a clas­sic prod­uct designed for the nou­veaux riches. His Bible promised to up-and-coming classes the same access to writ­ten cul­ture afforded pre­vi­ously only by eccle­si­as­tics and nobility.

We can see that in even in its style. Gutenberg’s work left the intial let­ters unprinted with space left for illu­mi­na­tion. His printed Bible was meant to sim­u­late the great illu­mi­nated Bibles owned by the nobil­ity and rich monas­ter­ies, but for a bargain-basement price. That’s not to say they were cheap. Gutenberg’s Bible would have cost the aver­age worker a for­tune. It was still a pres­tige piece, not meant for study but to dec­o­rate the col­lec­tions of those who wished to be iden­ti­fied with book culture.

What we see in Luther’s work is an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of thing. Here was a whole Bible meant for study, for read­ing. It was designed to be printed en masse, to be bought and dis­trib­uted to many peo­ple below the nobil­ity, used in churches and schools for cat­e­ch­esis. We can see the dif­fer­ence in the design. Older Bibles were large, folio-sized objects, printed in small num­bers. Luther’s was was small, mass-produced, and affordable.

I’m very weary of the hipster obsession with zombies by now. Cut it out, hipsters. So I felt shame the other night as my friend and I sprinted through the dark along treacherously uneven brick sidewalks, running from zombies and loving it.

Not real zombies, or even hipsters—we were responding to an awesome app for Android phones called Zombie, Run! It’s a location-based game of sorts that places a bunch of zombies between you and your destination on the map. When you’re near enough to a zombie, it begins to give chase. You must reach your destination without a zombie catching you and eating your brains. It’s lots of fun and can make mundane trips much more interesting, especially if you enjoy running around like a maniac in public.

But a game like this is also fascinating when you set down your can of High Life and put on your Geographer hat. It directs a kind of spatial behavior that technology more often stamps out in one way or another—wandering. While our gizmos usually tell us exactly where something is and how to get there, here is something that forces a person to stray from the direct path. Assuming the player keeps his eyes open and actually notices the world around him, the game provides an interesting way of experiencing and understanding urban spaces. By acting upon virtual landscape in the physical landscape, the player travels unpredicted paths and enters areas that might otherwise never have been seen.

Summertime, and the smoke wafts heavenward from back yards, patios, rooftops, and balconies. Like so many pieces of the American dream, this one starts cheap—$20 or so at Wal-Mart—and goes as high-end as you can imagine (and probably higher). But is it just us, or does this little piece of Americana really deliver on its promises, more truly than most things you can buy at a big box store? Maybe it is just us—our sorry suburban selves, lost in the suburbs’ dream of just enough rustic touches to keep alive a vestigial memory of wilderness. But maybe the grill, and the close encounters it delivers with both raw meat and searing flame, is a signpost to a better way.

The questions below come from Andy’s book, and in the coming weeks and months we’ll apply them to a wide variety of cultural artifacts, looking for the ways these artifacts shape not just our lived experience but our hopes, fears, and dreams. (If you’ve got an idea, email Andy or Nate and we’ll do our best to use it.) Pitch in—you are certain to notice something no one else has. Let the five questions begin.

Update: Also check out the conversation prompted by this one at Rod Dreher’s ever-excellent Crunchy Con weblog.

But that was only the first part of the experiment. The psychologists then repeated the jam taste test with a separate group of college students, only this time they asked them to explain why they preferred one brand over another. As the undergrads tasted the jams, the students filled out written questionnaires, which forced them to analyze their first impressions, to consciously explain their impulsive preferences. All this extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment. The students now preferred Sorrel-Ridge—the worst tasting jam according to Consumer Reports—to Knott’s Berry farm, which was the experts’ favorite jam. The correlation plummeted to .11, which means that there was virtually no relationship between the rankings of the experts and the opinions of these introspective students.

What happened? Wilson and Schooler argue that “thinking too much” about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don’t actually matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences, we start searching for reasons to prefer one jam over another.  For example, we might notice that the Acme brand is particularly easy to spread, and so we’ll give it a high ranking, even if we don’t actually care about the spreadability of jam. Or we might notice that Knott’s Berry Farm has a chunky texture, which seems like a bad thing, even if we’ve never really thought about the texture of jam before. But having a chunky texture sounds like a plausible reason to dislike a jam, and so we revise our preferences to reflect this convoluted logic.

—Yo-Yo Ma, interviewed by David Mermelstein, 29 July 2010

How does a simple commercial for men’s soap become a cultural phenomenon? Random crown. When does a product’s “social media push” shift from being lame and contrived to being so self-awarely lame and contrived as to seem genuinely brilliant and spontaneous? Motorcycle chef. What happens when you lock up a fine-looking man and countless writers and art directors and camerapeople on a shower-set for two days with a twitter feed, an HD camera, and a YouTube account? Delicious cake. What can we learn about gender, race, and commerce from a tour de force of ironic masculinity? Chainsaw. And what other five questions might we ask about it all? Monacle smile.

—Nate Barksdale

It’s interesting to see that although people appreciate their very rich culture, they do not connect its traditions to contemporary knowledge and practices. For example, students in the graphic design course I taught at ENAV asked me to give them lessons in color, insisting they knew nothing about it. This really surprised me. My immediate answer was, “But you should teach me! You’re surrounded by color and use it in such powerful ways in every aspect of daily life. I admire you for it!” Their response was to laugh and say, “But Teacher! That’s not design! We need to use design colors.” From talking to my students and people in the cultural sector, I got the impression that design was this distant, quite artificial, field they had to adapt to. Their main concern is learning software.

The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco has a wonderful special exhibition, Birth of Impressionism, which uses French paintings from the late 19th century to provide a kind of social history of the impressionist movement. As is well known, the impressionists were shut out of the classic Paris salons because of their unorthodox subject matter and style. Rejected by the art establishment, they became a school of their own. The exhibition shows many of the paintings that were accepted by the official shows; and it offers early impressionist paintings that reveal how the painters interacted with each other as their movement took shape.

For example, there’s a painting of a painter painting. His model is a dead bird. Displayed next to this painting is another of that same dead bird. But this second painting is not the one portrayed in the first painting, it is by a third painter, who happened along to the studio, saw the dead bird being painted, and set up his easel to paint alongside. Three artists going at it in a kind of art incest.

Two comments. First, the official salon paintings that the impressionists reacted against were often magnificent paintings. They weren’t all stiff, tired, and mannered, as art history would sometimes seem to suggest. Also, it’s not hard to see that they shared some of the impressionists’ approach. In fact, one could easily mistake some of their paintings for impressionist art.

Revolutionaries tend to overstate their reaction against the status quo. Really, the New Age owes a lot to the reviled Old Age.

Second, the impressionists became a “school” mainly because the official salon rejected them. They had widely different ideas and styles, and no one might ever have thought to group them had they not been driven together by their rejection. They met together, often. They met in cafes on a regular basis to talk and argue, and they often disagreed strenuously. (At one such meeting Manet fought a duel with Duranty, and wounded him. Afterwards, their friendship continued.) The cafes gave them a place to work out their ideas and to be part of something bigger than themselves. Revolutions require fellowship. And rejection can create it.

Where do would-be revolutionaries find fellowship today? On the internet?

Our findings suggest that marketers of green products are well-advised to clearly link such products to status (e.g., celebrity endorsers, prestigious events), especially when a green product is relatively expensive (e.g., when such products have high development costs and cannot be sold at a loss). As indicated by Study 2, however, a key component of harnessing the power of status motives to benefit social welfare necessitates that the prosocial acts be visible to others, whereby such acts can clearly influence the well-doer’s reputation. For example, nonprofit organizations are well-advised to give their benefactors visible signs, tags, or badges (e.g., the highly visible yellow Livestrong armband signifying cancer donations), so that benefactors can clearly display their self-sacrificing and status-enhancing acts.

A costly signaling framework also suggests that it would be a mistake to link green products to status when such products are relatively cheap because inexpensive products can undermine the signaling of wealth by its owner. Indeed, a key counterintuitive aspect of this framework is that attempts to make green products cheaper, easier to buy, or more time-saving can actually undercut their utility as a signal of environmentalist/altruist dedication. For example, in contrast to standard economic models, a costly signaling framework suggests that electric cars might be seen as more prestigious and more desirable if recharging stations are harder to find and take longer to recharge the batteries, rather than being ubiquitous, fast, and efficient.

The man who wrote it owned other human beings. The rich Anglo-Saxon males who signed it believed themselves superior to women, Catholics, Jews, other Europeans, Native Americans, blacks, Asians, and poor white males. It contained no development strategy, no announced intention for poverty reduction, and no nation-building Power Point presentation. For many decades afterward, anyone who took it literally would have been seen as crazy.

Yet the principles the Declaration gave in two sentences have done more than anything else for both liberty and development in the 234 years since that day.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Happy birthday, Declaration, and thank you.

A characteristic of play, in fact, is that it creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from work or art. At the end of the game, all can and must start over again at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued. Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money ... As for the professionals—the boxers, cyclists, jockeys, or actors who earn their living in the ring, track, or hippodrome or on the stage, and who must think in terms of prize, salary, or title—it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play it is at some other game.