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by Laura Kasischke
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Without a lot of fanfare in the early 1980s a fledgling cable channel called MTV launched in New Jersey. No one knew it at the time but it was the start of something big, a sea change in American society that would break the big traditional values of the 50s and 60s down into specialized, bite sized chunks ready to be gobbled up by enthusiasts, fanboys and hop heads for the next several decades. At the same time microbreweries were steadily growing in popularity from a niche interest into a national powerhouse that only continues to expand to this day. But does all this specialization just mean more fun for everybody? Or does it come at a cost?
Joining us on this episode are Theresa McCulla, curator of the American brewing history initiative at the National Museum of American History, and Alan Newman, co-founder of Magic Hat Brewing in Burlington, VT. We’re also joined by the one and only Colin Connor who’s nice enough to add a little pizzazz to the landmark 1995 essay “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam.
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Please SUBSCRIBE and RATE the show if you can. Join us every two weeks as we talk about history's favorite drinks and how what we drink shapes history. To see what's coming next follow Greg on instagram @100ProofGreg. #drinkinghistory
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Hello from a crypto farm in rural China!
This week Andy talks with the director (Jessica Kingdon) and producer (Kira Simon-Kennedy) of the new film Ascension, a documentary about working life in contemporary China. Ascension has received critical acclaim and garnered major awards and nominations, including being shortlisted for the Academy Awards!
The film features scenes of quotidian working life in a period when the government has begun to promote the “Chinese Dream,” spanning textile and sex doll factories to etiquette school and social media influencers all the way to luxurious water parks and tropical vacation resorts. Together, these scenes raise provocative questions about China’s blindingly rapid development, the uneven pace of upward mobility, and whether China is an exotic outlier or a recognizably modern society, comparable with life in the US and other societies worldwide (all to music by Dan Deacon).
Jessica and Kira took the time to chat with us and many from our Discord community about the film’s initial conception, the origins of the title and Jessica’s own exploration of family history, the strangeness of the major award circuit, and the ethics of making a commercial documentary. They also break down many of the more memorable scenes, including a dinner party among the ultra-rich and a crypto farm in the middle of the countryside.
You can look for ways to watch it on the film’s website, the linktree, and its IG account.
But for most of us, the easiest way to watch it at home is to subscribe to and stream from Paramount+ (look for trial offers!).
The second half of this episode consists of questions from our Discord members. If you’re interested in joining the conversation with us and tons of other cool people, please think about subscribing! Check us out via Patreon and Substack, contact us via email (timetosaygoodbyepod@gmail.com), Twitter, and the Discord!
Pfizer set to seek COVID vaccine approval for the youngest Americans. The Midwest prepares for a winter wallop. Threats against historically black colleges. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
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Alabama
National
The idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. The act of imagining someone else’s reactions may be hard, but based on the body of work by George Loewenstein, predicting how -- under varying circumstances -- we might walk in our own shoes may not be all that easier.
Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His enormous range of research interests can be boiled down, after a lot of boiling, to applying psychology to economics and, more recently, economics to psychology.
His career as a founder of both behavioral economics and neuro-economics has seen him delve deeply into how we react when our “affective state” is cold – when are emotions are absent and our physical needs are currently met – compared to when our affective state is hot. The latter is when out emotions are active or when our passions, as the old philosophers might term things like things hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, are pulling us.
It turns out, as he explains to interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “when we are in one affective state it’s difficult for us to imagine how we would behave if we were in a different affective state. … The worst mistakes we make are when we are in a cold state, because we just can’t imagine how we would behave if we were in a hot state.”
While this may seem like something we know intuitively (or after years of high-profile experiments by Lowenstein, his frequent collaborator Leaf VanBoven, and others have conducted, several described in this podcast), it’s not something we act on intuitively. “No matter how many times we experience fluctuations in affective states,” Loewenstein says, “it just seems we don’t learn about this. We are always going to mis-predict how we’re going to behave when we’re in a hot state if we’re making the prediction when we’re in a cold state.”
This, in turn, affects the products of people who make predictions (or if you prefer, policy prescriptions) as a profession, he adds, such as economists.
“According to conventional economics, when we make decisions about the future we should be thing about what it is will we want in the future. What all of these results show is that your current state influences your prediction about what you’re going to want in the future; it influences these decisions that we make for the future in unproductive, self-destructive ways.”