Culture in the Blender

While watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica that had originally aired on Australian television, I recognized the song they used in the trailer for the next episode. I couldn’t remember who sang it, but I remembered the name of the song – Spaceman. A little YouTubing later, I remembered it was by Babylon Zoo and [...]

An older Racialicious post made me think of the attitude I’ve seen both online and in real life from some Americans, who seem to think it’s endlessly cool to be Japanese. I’m not really sure where this meme comes from. Americans are very patriotic, so what makes a subset of probably the most patriotic people [...]

I attended a latin jazz concert last Friday. It was very comforting. Brazilian (and by association, other latin-inspired) music feels familiar and comfortable, even though I’ve never been to Brazil. When I was a baby, my father was working on a big project in Brazil and bought Brazilian music there. When I had trouble sleeping, [...]

My psychology of culture textbook tells me if you consider a culture to include all individual variations within the culture, cultural differences disappear. For example, the differences between Japanese and American culture disappear. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy as a TCK to take a part of a culture that you like and use that [...]

给大家新年快乐!

春节快乐!

Happy Spring Festival!

The two classes I’m auditing intersected in an interesting way recently. In Judy Wajcman’s book Feminism Confronts Technology, there is a chapter on technology as masculine culture. One of the subsections is on engineering. Wajcman argues that
“central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between science and sensuality, the hard and the [...]

It never ceases to amaze me how much more difficult it is to fly domestic inside the US compared to intercontinental flights. When I first started to fly domestic in the US, I loved not needing a passport and various visa documentation to get back in. Now, I’d much rather deal with that than fly [...]