The Culture Compendium

We are born as remixes of our parents. We all learn through copying at first. It is via copies that our life's work is preserved, because no original can last forever.

Highlights

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Education

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real (17 December 2020): short version, it was the researchers all along.
Video games help children improve literacy, communication and mental well-being, survey finds (5 September 2020)
Report reveals young people felt less anxious and more connected to school in lockdown (24 August 2020)
Young children would rather explore than get rewards (12 August 2020)
UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage (24 February 2020)
If Your University’s Administration Ran a Polar Expedition (21 January 2020)

We’re Striking to Save Britain’s Universities (November 2019)
OPINION: Separating 'gifted' children hasn't led to better achievement (4 November 2019)
Elementary-School Curriculum Is All Wrong (August 2019)
Smart kids eventually grow up (8 June 2018)
World Englishes in ELT: Mounting Evidence from the Cutting Edge (22 May 2017)

Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns (24 October 2014)
Teaching Math to People Who Think They Hate It (October 2014)
There is a Literacy Crisis in the United Kingdom (12 September 2014)
School Libraries Are Removing Classic Literature (27 July 2014)
Un taux record de réussite au baccalauréat (11 July 2014)
5 Tips for Teaching the Tough Kids (11 June 2014)
Why boarding schools produce bad leaders (9 June 2014)
Présenter un examen comme crucial fait baisser la réussite des élèves (24 April 2014)
Le harcèlement à l'école marque les victimes à vie (19 April 2014)
"I can't speak English – and it's a sore point for me" (13 April 2014)
Report from education think tank calls for definition of digital literacy (31 March 2014)
Infographic: 4 Ways the Internet is Making Kids Smarter (10 March 2014)
Tiger Mom, Helicopter Dad: You Both Have It Wrong (18 February 2014)
The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age (January 2014)
Report: 250 Million School Age Kids Can't Read (29 January 2014)
What's Really Wrong With Education in the US? (29 January 2014)

What Finland can teach America about education (3 December 2013)
Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World (2 December 2013)
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses (October 2013)
Children are suffering a severe deficit of play (18 September 2013)
Self-Regulation: American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist Kids (3 September 2013)
Is Core Curriculum Rotten? (3 August 2013)
Memory in Elementary School Children Is Improved by an Unrelated Novel Experience (9 June 2013)
Public’s Knowledge of Science and Technology (22 April 2013)
Eighth grader designs standardized test that slams standardized tests (17 April 2013)
Pourquoi nous avons besoin de jouer, partager et bidouiller la science (3 April 2013)

The School-Less Revolution: Free Online Courses Being Considered For College Credit (14 November 2012)
The disruption of education: How technology is helping students teach themselves (2 November 2012)
Tomorrow’s College Will be Free: Massive Open Online Courses (22 October 2012)
For Students, Why the Question is More Important Than the Answer (October 2012)
4 Ways High School Makes You Hate Reading (2 October 2012)
Schools Ditch The Classroom To Put Play Back In Education (31 May 2012)
Dear Governor: Lobby to Save a Love of Reading (20 January 2012)

Appalachia

The Dialect of the Appalachian People

Why Many of Our Appalachian Ancestors Believed in Fairies | Appalachian Magazine (5 March 2019)
Appalachian Moonshine: The Real History Behind White Lightnin’ (5 February 2019)
Analysis: The Pharmaceutical Colonization of Appalachia (12 February 2018)
That Old Granny Magic – Appalachian Ink (31 October 2017)
Days of the Dog Star – Appalachian Ink (18 July 2017)
Golden: A Love Letter to Appalachia (17 February 2017)
How to speak Southern Appalachian (December 2015)
Gender and Family Farms: An Investigation (5 October 2015)
Strange Mysteries of the Appalachian Mountains (June 2015)
For the Queens and Kings of Appalachia (4 December 2014)
Appalachians Leaving Coal for the New Economy (28 July 2014)

Japan

In Japan, Dead American Brands Get a Second Chance (December 2019)
My Culture is Not Your Toy: A Gay Japanese Man’s Perspective on Queer Eye Japan (15 November 2019)
Film photography shows signs of revival among Japan's youth (7 July 2019)
The cat who saved a Japanese rail line (22 May 2019)

Growing Pains: A Father and Daughter on Islamic Parenting in Japan (8 March 2018)
Inside the world of the Ainu, the little-known indigenous people of Japan (28 July 2017)
“Blue” for Go? Exploring Japanese Colors (3 June 2017)
Japanese stereotypes of European countries, based on Japanese Google autocomplete suggestions (25 April 2016)
10 Japanese Travel Tips for Visiting America (8 February 2016)
How Being a White Girl in Japan Helped Me Understand My White Privilege (4 February 2016)
What the west can learn from Japan’s “lost decades” (19 March 2015): Roland Kelts wonders whether Japan-style stagnation would really be so bad in the west.
Tokyo Metropolitan Area to Establish "English Village" (27 December 2014)
Takeshi Kitano criticises Japanese film industry (26 October 2014)
Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917-1931) (June 2014)
How Japan Copied American Culture and Made it Better (April 2014)
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? (20 October 2013)
The Chinese residents who call Japan home (13 August 2013)
Reaching the Last Speakers of Japan’s Ancient Languages (28 March 2013)

2021

Gabriel Knight Creator Jane Jensen's Successful Second Act: Erotic Novelist (31 March 2021)
On the Embaddening of Geek Culture (18 March 2021)
The Case for Semicolons (9 February 2021): There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.
Screen Time Cannot Be Worse Than My Dumb And Dangerous Childhood (26 January 2021): Whatever you do on a screen, you can’t light it on fire
How White Supremacy Is Like a Drug (22 January 2021)
Over 700,000 paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free (21 January 2021)
“We have time” is a dangerous myth to believe in (17 January 2021)

2020

Why is this interesting? - The Archivist Edition (8 December 2020): On the power of archives, Herman Miller, and process
Media Market Research (and why its undermining all the things you love) (6 December 2020)
Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry, and American Identity (3 December 2020)
Zanele Muholi: Celebrating South Africa's black LGBTQIA+ community (2 December 2020)
If museums want to diversify, they’ll have to change. A lot. (18 November 2020)
The Shape of a Story (17 November 2020)
What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them. (11 November 2020)
Study reveals gender bias in TA evaluations (3 November 2020)
Sean Connery: James Bond actor dies aged 90 (31 October 2020)
30 Times Male Authors Showed They Barely Know Anything About Women (28 October 2020)
Map Shares Every Country’s Most Famous Mythical Creature (22 October 2020)
20 ‘Then And Now’ Pics That Show How Time Changes Things 📷 (14 September 2020)
The X-Files and the Scully Effect — fake aliens, real-world phenomenon for women in STEM (19 August 2020)
The Matrix Was Intended to Be a Trans Story, Says Lilly Wachowski (4 August 2020)
The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications (26 July 2020)
Polyamorous relationships granted legal rights in Massachusetts (5 July 2020)
Myths About Crime We Believe Thanks To Pop Culture (28 June 2020)
English place-names (24 June 2020)
On Finding Out Your Heroes are Monsters (Or: Detoxifying A Culture) (19 June 2020)
Names Matter (11 June 2020)
A group is threatening legal action & demanding payment for use of the bisexual pride flag (29 April 2020)
Leaving The Transformers Fandom (21 April 2020)
Brian Dennehy Dead: ‘Tommy Boy’ and ‘First Blood’ Star Dies at 81 (16 April 2020)
Breakthrough of Digital Culture: Finland accepts the Demoscene on its national UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity (15 April 2020)
Young people capitalize on cheap coronavirus flights: 'If I die, I die' (10 March 2020)
Confronting rape culture means changing the conversation on rapists (2 March 2020)

2019

Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back (12 December 2019)
Music is the weapon (November 2019)
Why LGBTQ+ Representation in Webcomics Is So Game-Changing for Queer College Women (18 October 2019)
In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace (17 October 2019)
Abe’s New Word Order (12 October 2019)
How Scooby Doo Revived Gothic Storytelling for Generations of Kids (13 September 2019)
Less Human Than Human: The Design Philosophy of Steve Jobs (10 September 2019)
Mattel Introduces World's First Gender-Neutral Doll (September 2019)
Marcel Proust's Lost Gay Love Stories to Finally Be Published (August 2019)
Most writing advice is free, but the value varies (15 August 2019)
Turkish Garbage Collectors Open a Library from Books Rescued from the Trash (26 May 2019)
Poll: Church membership in US plummets over past 20 years (18 April 2019)
Critiquing Cultural Appropriation in Books That Are Kinda Meh (13 April 2019)
This Webcomic Librarian Is Protecting LGBTQ Stories (4 August 2019)
Male sex workers take over Amsterdam's Red Light District windows (3 August 2019)
Mauna Kea protests: what’s at stake for Native Hawaiians (24 July 2019)
Photographers, Instagrammers: Stop Being So D*mn Selfish and Disrespectful (22 July 2019)
Dark Horse Announces ElfQuest: Stargazer's Hunt (15 July 2019)
Growing number of car-sharing users don’t rent cars for driving (4 July 2019)
Mark Coker Interviewed by Hannah Howe (29 June 2019)
UAE gift helps French palace reopen 'forgotten theatre' (18 June 2019)
It is literally impossible to write a sentence without grammar (June 2019)
Assholes: A Probing Examination (3 June 2019)
These awesome & inspiring church signs have doubled the congregation’s size (May 2019)
An Entire Methodist Confirmation Class Rejects the Church Over Anti-Gay Policies (30 April 2019)
Shazam and Sekiro: Gatekeepers Die Twice (17 April 2019)
Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War on the Cassette Tape in the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back (April 2019)
Why Asking The People Around You Is A Crappy Way Of Seeing If Your Culture’s Okay (28 March 2019)
Cory Doctorow: Terra Nullius (March 2019)
Scientology and the Fellowship (March 2019)
63 Artists’ Tributes To Late Comic Book Legend Stan Lee (15 March 2019)
How language shapes the way we play (13 March 2019)
Rainbow Arcade and Digital Queer History (7 January 2019)

2018

Ringing in the New Year with new public domain content (31 December 2018)
The (Straight) Male Gaze Rules on Sanitized Social Media (11 December 2018)
Metro 2033 film has been cancelled because the scripter wanted to 'Americanize' it (10 December 2018)
The Real-Life Heroine Who Inspired a Character on ‘Boardwalk Empire’ (7 December 2018)
The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious (12 November 2018)
Charles Addams: The Long Island Macabre Master Who Created The Addams Family (29 October 2018)
All you need is loves: the truth about polyamory (25 September 2018)
The Skeleton of Jeremy Bentham (24 August 2018)
The Fairytale Language of the Brothers Grimm (2 May 2018): How the Brothers Grimm went hunting for fairytales, accidentally changed the course of historical linguistics, and kickstarted a new field of scholarship in folklore.
7 in 10 young people in the UK are non-religious, new research finds (21 March 2018)
This 19-year-old Kiwi farmer accidentally became a character in a US board game (24 January 2018)

2017

Someone Wrote A Feminist Defense Of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" And I Don't Know What To Feel (28 November 2017)
Bram Stoker’s Horror Classic is Steeped in the Anxieties of his Age (8 November 2017)
Demons Licking Your Toes: An Early 20th Century Manuscript from Isfahan (31 October 2017)
200+ Posters From the Golden Age of Graphic Design Are Now Free to Download (21 July 2017)
More Than Just a Pretty Face: Unmasking Furry Fandom (May 2017)
An English Sheep Farmer’s View of Rural America (1 March 2017)
Designer Creates Arabic Illustrated Words that Show Their Literal Meaning (17 February 2017)
Vanishing Point: How the Light Grid Defined 1980s Futurism (16 February 2017)
What Makes Someone a Native Speaker? (February 2017)
Ships On Ships: Noella Whitney Talks 'Broadside' (20 January 2017)

2016

The Power of Play: A Reading List (2 November 2016)
Halloween Special: Vampires, Ruins, and Spooky Places in Romania (31 October 2016)
'The Magnificent Seven,' 'The Lone Ranger,' and the Whitewashing of Western Movies (October 2016)
Get Your Children Good and Dirty (15 September 2016)
The Secret Furry Patrons Keeping Indie Artists Afloat (August 2016)
The colours associated with the cardinal directions in Chinese, Turkish and Lakota (11 August 2016)
African Science Fiction and Literature (7 August 2016)
Why Calvin and Hobbes is Great Literature (18 July 2016)
This Man's Transformation Into Disney Princesses Has To Be Seen To Be Believed 📷 (20 June 2016)
A submariner watches "Hunt for the Red October" (17 February 2016)
Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not (13 January 2016)

2015

"Something Terrible Has Happened Here": The Crazy Story Of How "Clue" Went From Forgotten Flop To Cult Triumph (10 December 2015)
A Day In the Life of An Empowered Female Character (26 November 2015)
Classroom Redesign: Students Take On the Challenge (19 October 2015)
How The Addams Family does BDSM right (September 2015)
Give Yourself More Playtime (June 2015)
If the countries of Europe were high school students, what would they be like? (24 April 2015)
Romanian Myths, Monsters, and Heroes (2 April 2015)
The Shut-In Economy (25 March 2015)
What Women Want...in Women Characters (March 2015)
What They Really Mean When They Say They're Not a Feminist (March 2015)
Uganda’s Tarantino and his $200 action movies (13 March 2015)
10 Languages With Uniquely Bizarre Quirks (12 March 2015)
Here's How to Speak, Drink, and Fight Like a Newfoundlander (26 February 2015)

2014

Some Ways That I Act Like A Guy (21 November 2014)
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Die Onstage (November 2014)
Lost Painting Found by Art Historian While Watching Stuart Little (November 2014)
How Pinocchio set the standard for feature animation (11 November 2014)
F-bombs for Feminism Features Tiny Princesses Swearing (22 October 2014)
Pope ditches Latin as official language of Vatican synod (7 October 2014)
Martial arts and the cycle of bullshit (10 September 2014)
Reddit user made famous off celeb nude photos wants his privacy back (8 September 2014)
Homosexualité, immigration : Harry Potter rend les enfants plus tolérants (31 July 2014)
How a New Dutch Library Smashed Attendance Records (21 July 2014)
How They Made ‘The Flintstones’: 15 Unpublished Photos 📷 (20 July 2014)
17 Lies We Need to Stop Teaching Boys About Sex (17 July 2014)
Authors dress up as their favourite characters (29 June 2014)
Why self-publishing is the new punk (13 June 2014)
Snooty Snobs Should Shut Up (7 June 2014)
New Swimwear Line Proves You Don't Need 2 Breasts To Look Sexy (28 May 2014)
Boys Wear Skirts To School In France To Fight Sexism (17 May 2014)
Black magician Aleister Crowley's early gay verse comes to light (9 May 2014)
Where the world's feminist pornographers gather (8 May 2014)
Little Zelda & Link Cosplay 📷 (28 April 2014)
Furry fandom: all humans welcome (21 April 2014)
Statue Of A Homeless Jesus Startles A Wealthy Community (3 April 2014)
‘Yes’ And ‘No’ Might Seem Pretty Simple, But That Doesn’t Mean This Chart Isn’t Very Necessary (31 March 2014)
Daughter of Osamu Tezuka, God of Manga, discovers his stash of hand-drawn sexy mouse artwork (29 March 2014)
Crimea's Attorney General Spawns Anime Fan Art (19 March 2014)
White Without Privilege (19 March 2014)
Is this the new Bechdel Test? (17 March 2014)
Irish children are dying from neglect and abuse (March 2014)
Male Protagonist Bingo: A study in cliches [MANY IMAGES] (12 March 2014)
15 Comics For Anyone Struggling To Explain What It Means To Be Queer (11 March 2014)
Un ouvrage de musique chinoise découvert à Cambridge (5 March 2014)
Signs You’ve Been Reading Too Much YA (19 February 2014)
Arizona Confronting Awkward Realization That Gay People Have Money, Buy Stuff (February 2014)
44 Stock Photos That Hope To Change The Way We Look At Women (12 February 2014)
Classic Video Games Reimagined as Romance Novels (11 February 2014)
The Bechdel Test needs an update: We’ve set the bar for female representation too low (7 January 2014)

2013

Virginity Is A Social Construct (19 December 2013)
Americans Try To Place European Countries On A Map (27 November 2013)
It's Thanksgiving So We Asked Brits To Label The United States — We're So Sorry, America (26 November 2013)
In Defense of Funeral Selfies (30 October 2013)
Fool Me 16,380 Times, Shame on Me (29 October 2013)
Punk Band Shoots Porn Film on Front Lawn of Westboro Baptist Church (3 October 2013)
Captain America in a turban (10 September 2013)
Artists Respond to DC’s Harley Quinn Contest (10 September 2013)
Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroids (20 August 2013)
I hate Strong Female Characters (August 2013)
Hamlet is Banned (August 2013)
500 New Fairy Tales Discovered in Germany (9 August 2013)
Bob Mazzer On The Tube 📷 (19 July 2013)
A Billion Stories (July 2013)
The Increasingly Bad State of Disneyland Paris: A Neverending Story (14 July 2013)
Is There Such A Thing As An American Novel? (4 July 2013)
If Films Were Reviewed Like Video Games (29 June 2013)
McDonald's closing all restaurants in Bolivia as nation rejects fast food (13 June 2013)
Gaming's new frontier: Cancer, depression, suicide (9 May 2013)
Penury, swindlers and the American way (May 2013)
La Roumanie ou la nostalgie de Pif, héroïque chien de l'âge d'or (23 March 2013)
Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World (25 February 2013)
Meet the man trying to bust porn's greatest myths (20 February 2013)
How the internet is kickstarting a teen poetry revolution (20 February 2013)
Sparks will fly (14 February 2013)
Five Important Things Women Don't Know About Men (9 February 2013)
57% of American teenagers are media makers (10 February 2013)
My Weekend At A Furry Convention (24 January 2013)
Hanukkah and Thanksgiving: A once in eternity overlap (14 January 2013)

2012

American Creativity is Declining (10 November 2012)
How I Met George Jetson (23 September 2012)
Dalai Lama tells his Facebook friends that religion "is no longer adequate" (12 September 2012)
An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping (9 August 2012)

2007-2011

The Self-Attribution Fallacy (7 November 2011)
8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance (4 August 2011)
Why Do So Many Designs or Products Look The Same? (6 December 2010)
Sweet land of... conformity? (6 June 2010)
A Palindromic Message from the Lost Generation (1 February 2009)
Yo as a Pronoun (11 January 2008)
The Strange Lovecraftian Statuary of Puerto Vallarta (February 2007)

2004

Cargo cult's feud with Prophet Fred's sect splits Pacific island (8 May 2004)

Unsorted