Our feet are grape-squashed in memories
our skins are still flushed
from the touch
of summer’s lips.
Feist and Hundreds of Choir Members Sing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ in Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor
Just hit play on this one and watch it. Absolutely magical…it sent shivers down my spine. The organization that arranged this is called Choir! Choir! Choir! and they also did a version of this in Dublin with 1000 people singing in tribute
I’ve previously featured the group singing David Bowie’s Heroes with David Byrne, who said this of the experience:
What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?
A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.
(via open culture)
Suicide Rates Are up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls.“Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in the Anglosphere countries, especially for girls. For data on all sources, and larger versions of the graphs, see Rausch and Haidt (2023). Before 2010, there was not much happening. By 2015, self-harm episodes were at record-high levels in all five countries. . . . I have added a shaded area on all graphs from 2010 to 2015, which is the period that Jon calls ‘The Great Rewiring of Childhood’ in his forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation. It’s the five-year period when adolescence changed to a phone-based form; adolescents went from nearly all owning flip phones (or other basic phones) to nearly all owning smartphones with high-speed data plans and continuous (and nearly unlimited) access to the internet and social media. This is the five-year period in which adolescent mental health began to deteriorate around the Western world.”
Also: The Female Happiness Paradox.
Skimming, scanning, scrolling – the age of deep reading is over
Financial Times (read free): “…Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Stunning numbers of people with years of schooling are effectively illiterate. Admittedly, nostalgics have been whining about new media since 1492, but today’s whines have an evidential basis. To quote this month’s Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, signed by publishers’ and library associations, scholars, PEN International and others: “The digital realm may foster more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many temptations to read in a superficial and scattered manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.” That’s ominous, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilisation. It enabled the Enlightenment, democracy and an international rise in empathy for people who aren’t like us. How will we cope without it?”
Publishers and scholars, unite!