Posted:
https://apnews.com/article/blue-origin-wheelchair-rocket-launch-e1b993bc7a66a1d587d94a0fb37aff8f
Paraplegic engineer becomes the first wheelchair user to blast into space
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Mitali bilkul apni maasi par gyi hai: Mihir killed it.
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https://apnews.com/article/blue-origin-wheelchair-rocket-launch-e1b993bc7a66a1d587d94a0fb37aff8f
Paraplegic engineer becomes the first wheelchair user to blast into space
Drama is normal—but when does it call for a professional intervention?
How Animals Navigate Darkness
Mouse brains perform a clever mechanism to count their steps and keep them on track
The body may know where we’re going before our eyes do, building maps of the world that rely on a kind of internal GPS rather than on landmarks or other visual cues. This process, known as path integration, allows the brain to track each step and turn you make, updating your position in time and space—even in the dark.
Certain neurons in the hippocampus known as place cells are central to this process in the brain. They activate at specific locations regardless of whether an animal can see their surroundings, relying on internal cues to decide which spots get special consideration. Working together, the neurons fire in patterns that track the passage of time and distance during movement.
A team of scientists from the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience have recently uncovered new details about how these internal maps work: Rather than using a single internal clock, the brain uses two interacting sets of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus. The researchers published their findings in Nature Communications.
Scientists have long known that the hippocampus helps animals navigate, and that some neurons fire up at specific places they visit. “However, in environments full of sights, sounds, and smells, it is difficult to tell whether these neurons are responding to those sensory cues or to the animal’s position itself,” explained Yingxue Wang, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Florida Institute of Neuroscience and a paper co-author, in a statement.
To cut through the noise, the researchers worked with mice, whose hippocampal circuits can be recorded and manipulated with great precision. They first trained the mice to run fixed distances along a virtual linear track to reach a reward. The track didn’t feature any obvious landmarks or visual cues, which forced the mice to rely on internal estimates of distance and time. While the mice ran through the course, the researchers recorded activity across hundreds of neurons. Then they used light to mess with certain inhibitory circuits and test how those disruptions shaped the animals’ sense of time and distance.
Once they had collected the recordings, two distinct patterns emerged. One set of excitatory neurons called PyrUp was activated all at once at the start of movement and then gradually faded, each at its own pace. Taken together, this staggered activity appears to give the brain something to measure against, letting it know how far along the journey the animal has traveled. Another set, known as PyrDown excitatory neurons, showed the opposite pattern, quieting down at the start of movement and then gradually ramping back up. This activity helped mark the start of a new journey, preventing the brain from mixing one trip with the next.
From there, the team used light to silence two kinds of inhibitory neurons in the brain: SST neurons, which help stabilize the brain’s internal timing signals, and PV neurons, which act as a kind of reset button. When these neurons were silenced, the mice misjudged distance or time without changing their running speed. That finding reinforced the idea that PyrUp and PyrDown neurons encode internal measures of time and space, rather than movement itself. Additional control experiments confirmed that the effects weren’t due to motor problems, visual deficits, or altered expectations of reward.
If similar patterns are found in people, they might help explain why people with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia often become disoriented even in familiar places—and could point toward new therapeutic targets for restoring that lost sense of where we are.
https://lithub.com/why-has-criticism-always-been-such-a-good-side-gig-for-artists/
Why Has Criticism Always Been Such a Good Side Gig for Artists?
David Berry on the Long Tradition of Artists as Critics, From Xie He to Charles Baudelaire
There might not be a more natural, if also more fraught, complementary profession to artistry than criticism. Who, after all, would have a better perspective on the necessary background and unique challenges of making art than some-one who does it themselves? But—considering everything from personal bias (if you don’t do it the way I do it, it can’t be worth doing) to the prospect of blowing up personal relationships (and maybe future commissions)—it can be deluded or even dangerous to offer your opinion for public consumption.
If we blur the line between philosophical aesthetic theory and popular critique, artists have been moonlighting as critics since the earliest days that the former category congealed. Plenty of Greek and Roman philosophy treats what we’d now call aesthetic theory as a crucial component of our conception of the world, although its overall project doesn’t really line up with our conception of what constitutes art. Those philosophers are better considered the forebears of the more august tradition of criticizing stuff without doing it first. (Which I wholeheartedly support, I must say, at least when you’re willing to think deeply about it.)
The earliest artist-critics we know about tend to come from outside Western traditions. The author of the Nāṭyaśāstra, which gave us the Indian concept of rasa—the emotional essence of a piece, the je ne sais quoi that moves us—is unknown, and might have been multiple people across many years, but that text was written in a distinctly poetic form that suggests it was the work of a practitioner.
There is and has been considerable tension about the extent to which criticism is a serious consideration of art and its effect on the soul—the extent to which it is an art in and of itself—and its place as a sort of de facto Consumer’s Guide.
Xie He was a sixth-century Chinese painter and writer whose only surviving work is The Record of the Classification of Old Painters, which includes his framework for understanding painting, the Six Principles. More than a millennium before Western aesthetic theory caught up, this engaged with the debate about craft versus art: “Even if the artist is skillful, he will not be able to elevate himself above an ordinary craftsman. Their art will be called painting, but in fact it will not be a true art. The Spirit Resonance is a gift of heavens, a natural talent one is born with. It pours straight out of one’s soul.”
The Arabic prince and poet Abdallah ibn al-Mu’tazz wrote a consideration of poetry, Kitab al-Badi, in the ninth century, some time before his one day reign as leader of the Abbasid Caliphate. (He was strangled to death, though it was a political matter, not the vengeance of an angry poet.) Both of those works, though, were more pure exercises of the mind than ways to make ends meet: Xie would have been painting only as a function of his post as civil servant in the Confucianist tradition, and al-Mu’tazz’s only worldly concern was political enemies.
Our more modern and cravenly capitalistic criticism has its strongest roots in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Richardson the Elder apprenticed under John Riley, the court painter of English king William of Orange, and made a fine living as a portrait painter of various nobles and notables throughout the first half of the 1700s. He struck gold, though, with several books on how to appreciate painting written in the 1710s and ‘20s, most notably An Essay on the Theory of Painting and An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism (the latter is one of the first recorded uses of the word “criticism”).
Though somewhat prosaic, even compared to Xie’s work—Richardson detailed his own eighteen-point scale in seven separate categories to determine the “worth” of a painting—it proved hugely popular with the burgeoning middle and merchant classes, who had enough money to buy paintings, just like the nobles they were trying to emulate, but not necessarily enough to hire experts and advisers.
There is and has been considerable tension about the extent to which criticism is a serious consideration of art and its effect on the soul—the extent to which it is an art in and of itself—and its place as a sort of de facto Consumer’s Guide. In the early days, it was a pretty pure creature of commerce. In England and France, with the rise of pamphlets and papers that spoke expressly to a middle class audience, criticism became a decent way to earn a living for anyone who knew a bit about painting and could string a few words together.
As with modern criticism, it didn’t hurt if you also knew how to play to your audience: the earliest surviving critique of the Parisian Salon, the annual exhibition of French Royal Academy painters, is an anonymous pamphlet that includes a fairly lengthy denigration of the nobles who attended and praises the general public for being far more savvy about good art. Not that nobles weren’t also interested in help with their taste: in his later life, the French polymath Diderot sustained himself partly on reviews of the Salon in the 1760s and ’70s for La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. The fact that reviews in general and the Correspondance in particular were banned in France and so sent abroad also helped raise his international profile, eventually leading to sustained support from Catherine the Great.
But it was newspapers and periodicals that gradually became the main outlet for artistic criticism, and once the practice became established enough that writers ceased using pseudonyms (to limit blowback from negative reviews) and stopped accepting “gifts” from subjects, criticism of various forms of art became a reliable way to make a name and a crust.
He blew through it quite quickly, and the rest of his life was a cycle of waiting for semi-lucrative writing work to come his way, moving to avoid creditors, and begging his mother for money.
William Hazlitt spent his twenties as a portrait painter, and though he grew frustrated with his self-diagnosed lack of talent and unwillingness to paint more flattering portraits of the rich people who were paying him, his studies helped him immensely when he was hired as a reporter. He transitioned quickly to critical reviews of painting, then literary works, indulging in both throughout his eventual career as one of the more celebrated essayists in the English language. (I worked for a time for an outlet that bears his name, although I hadn’t heard of him before they hired me. Apologies to William and all involved in my hiring.)
Perhaps the person who had the most lasting impact on both criticism and his preferred art form, though, was Charles Baudelaire. Presumably no one who gets adjectivized needs too much of an introduction, but luckily for our purposes, in addition to being hailed as an age-defining genius of criticism and poetry, he was absolute shit with money, which seemed to contribute to his critical output almost as much as his burning desire to explain why everyone else was wrong about the world.
Born in 1821, Baudelaire came from a fairly well-off family. His father died when he was only six, and his stepfather eventually became an ambassador, which set his mother up for life. Some part of Baudelaire’s lifelong free-spending and indolence seems to be a direct rebellion against the man, if not outright Freudian jealousy—Charles was an unabashed mama’s boy. He was encouraged to go into law or diplomacy like the step-old-man but decided to be a writer upon getting the 1800s equivalent of a trust fund when he was twenty-one.
He blew through it quite quickly, and the rest of his life was a cycle of waiting for semi-lucrative writing work to come his way, moving to avoid creditors, and begging his mother for money. She didn’t love that: “Oh, what grief,” his mother once wrote. “If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather … he would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier.” Might put your own mother asking how that screenplay is coming into a little more perspective.
Baudelaire’s first works to attract serious attention were reviews of the 1845 and 1846 Salons, which besides being both vivacious and occasionally vicious, preceded (and arguably inspired) the Impressionists’ critiques of the Academy by about thirty years—not that he would live to see them born out. In these reviews he established his method of responding viscerally to the work, rendering literal description of the paintings secondary to the feelings and thoughts the work evoked in him.
Though these tendencies would flourish in his later criticism—especially 1863’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” a consideration of his friend Constantin Guys which was published in Le Figaro and in which he invented the term “modernity”—the template he provided for modern criticism was established basically from the hop.
He published criticism more or less continuously from then on—when he was in the mood to write at all—but a decade later his reputation as a critic was overshadowed by the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal (ironically, the same year his stepfather died), parts of which he had been working on since his money first came in. An unsparing but vividly beautiful look at sex, mortality, melancholy, and the bleak harshness of then-modern Parisian life, the poetry book thrilled artists almost as much as it offended the general public. Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted and fined for offending public morality, and several poems were outright banned, removed from later editions. This didn’t hurt his reputation as a bold new voice, but it definitely didn’t help his ability to not hold on to money.
Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable.
Baudelaire died a decade after Fleurs du Mal’s release. He was witness to some of the impact it would have—Victor Hugo came to his public defence—and his reputation grew posthumously to the point that Rimbaud, Proust, and Eliot all credited him as the finest poet of his era. His increasing notoriety did not help his finances or his work ethic, though he had a brief period of security and relative productivity when his mother allowed him to move back in with her in 1859. Besides criticism, prose poetry, and translation, he wrote a consideration of being an opium and hashish user, and he decided to live that life more fully, mixed in with heavy drinking and a light wallet, when he moved to Brussels in 1864.
Less than two years later, he suffered a debilitating stroke, and he spent the last year of his life semi-paralyzed and unable to speak. Upon his death, his mother settled his rather voluminous debts and eventually came to peace with his place in literature.
However scattered his life, Baudelaire’s professional work has a gem-like unity. There is profound sympathy between his criticism and his poetry—including an almost fanatical obsession with drawing out the beauty of this thing in front of him, life or art, regardless of prevailing opinion—but his ability to push both of those forms in new directions seems almost impossible, with the vantage of hindsight. Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable, and as Baudelaire himself shows, a sharp and careful eye, a historical knowledge, and a gift for descriptive detail, in whatever medium, serve both very well.
With that said, the base impulse of art is to capture this spirit without necessarily explaining it, to reveal the energy that vibrates through the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings; criticism is more concerned with pinning down the butterfly and figuring out how it works. Both can help you feel the full extent of what a butterfly means, but arriving at the same place doesn’t mean taking the same road.
Consider this passage from “The Painter of Modern Life,” wherein Baudelaire explains what he means by modernity, and why Guys seems to embody it:
He strives, for his own part, to extract from the fashionable whatever it may contain of the poetical within the historical, to draw the eternal from the transitory…. It is easier to decide, at the outset, that everything about the modes of dress of an epoch is ugly, rather than applying oneself to extracting from it the mysterious beauty it might perhaps contain, however minimal or slight that might be. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art of which the other is the eternal and immutable.
The passage is precise, clear, and energetic. It’s convincing partly because it’s so invigorating, and there’s no doubting what it is we can or should do with the information here. It’s an argument, probably not totally rational, but on the spectrum. Baudelaire’s criticism has been accused, not unfairly, of being inconsistent, and at times it seems more like he is writing about what he wants to see—dreaming of Impressionism, maybe—than what is in front of him. Summing up the consensus, academic Sara Pappas says he “does not simply privilege the new in his art critical writings; he creates a kind of absolute originality through his writings that is not actually present in the art of the period in the way that he theorizes.”
But I think this inconsistency is not just part of the originality that made him so important; it’s part of what separates criticism, especially after Baudelaire, from a more academic aesthetic theory. Baudelaire is not really evaluating things along a framework; he’s responding to what he sees and feels in the moment; any consistency is down to the bounds of his temperament, his ideas of the world. It’s a part of the ‘spirit resonance’ that Xie He talked about, the vitality of the work. Any grander idea or narrative is emergent, not restrained to a purely rational or logical conception. His criticism is as consistent and considered as his moods and feelings—just pinned down and (often beautifully) articulated. Baudelaire’s poetry has the same tendency, without the pins.
Baudelaire had no shortage of impediments to writing, but I have to wonder if some of his slow and scattered process wasn’t due to balancing these competing impulses (or running away from them entirely when he couldn’t find any balance). As an organizing principle, the context required of good criticism is almost antithetical to good art: if the latter is about capturing the specificity of a vision or feeling, the former is about fitting those feelings in, finding their place, and weighing them against each other.
The inherent danger of spending too much time on anything other than art is that it will dull whatever sensitivity or instinct allows you to make something in the first place.
It can be utterly paralyzing to commit to your vision if you are confronted with its wider context. Comparison becomes the thief of joy: Why should you make anything when this thing and that thing and this other thing are all expressing the same feeling? What is the point of words that seem lesser than the genius who inspired you to write them? And if your work cannot find its wider place, if it does seem unique in viewpoint or execution, does that mean that you’re so far beyond the realm of sense or worth that no one else will ever get any value from it?
If Baudelaire ever felt those things, he got over them eventually (“I know that this book,” he wrote to his mother in the midst of the public backlash, in what is a spectacular act of either confidence or conciliatory bluster, “with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of Hugo, Gautier and even Byron”).
But that it took a world historical genius to overcome them is an indication of the danger of this particular gig as a sideline. The inherent danger of spending too much time on anything other than art is that it will dull whatever sensitivity or instinct allows you to make something in the first place. Maybe doubly so when your other job is examining that instinct so closely you might just need to kill it to understand it.
I don’t mean to be dramatic. Maybe I just mean to justify my own slow and laborious, though less debauched, process. Certainly plenty of people after Baudelaire have also navigated this conundrum, with (for the most part) less opium use and Freudian begging. One of the purest expressions of the Baudelairean tendency emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s in the magazine ARTnews, which hired a gaggle of poets from what would become known as the New York School to review the modern art scene.
Poets like Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery—who for the most part never made even a middle-class living publishing poetry, even in this apparently glorious age for writing-to-pay-the-bills—found a perfect subject in the abstract expressionism and pop art that came into vogue: a talent for succinct evocation, or just the inherent music of words, helped a lot when they were tasked with responding to colour fields or a repurposed bed with paint on it.
Like Baudelaire’s, these reviews tended to be, if not always light on descriptive detail, less concerned with telling you what a thing looked like and more with capturing the impression it left. In a review of a Robert Rauschenberg show, the not-yet-Pulitzer-winner John Ashbery said of one of the collages that it “does not have the ‘Step along, please’ feeling of a Schwitters collage … You also have the artist’s permission to get nothing out of looking at his paintings other than the marginal pleasure of being alive.”
That would fit right in with some of Ashbery’s purposefully poetic work, which also tends to eschew grandiose language or description for perfectly punctuated plain profundity. “The marginal pleasure of being alive” carries enough weight to justify a book, let alone a magazine. (Ashbery kept up his reviews and editing in outlets like New York, Newsweek, and the Partisan Review even after Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer in 1975, most certainly out of necessity.)
The Last Good Thing
DVDs, streaming, and the price of nostalgia
By Jess Love
On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.
I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.
Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.
At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.
In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.
Obviously.
That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.
“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.
Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?
To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.
“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”
Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.
An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.
They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair.
If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.
Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.
For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.
It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.
It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?
It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences.
In this manner, as DVDs were added to Christmas and birthday and pre-K graduation wish lists, and as I thought of more reasons why this was a good thing, I stopped considering DVDs in practical terms and began to think of them in moral terms. With every new struggle over what was just and right—should one child spend her birthday money on Bluey if that meant her freeloading sister would get to watch it, too?—my confidence in the moral superiority of the Way of the DVD was affirmed. This was what childhood was for! This was as good a moment as any to learn, in the words of Ursula from The Little Mermaid, “Life’s full of tough choices, innit?”
For my husband, who by virtue of being a father needed no introduction to life’s tough choices, the Way of the DVD was indeed transformative—just not quite in the way I’d expected. In mere months, he’d perfected the art of subscription hopping, signing up for free trial periods of Showtime and Ameba TV and Noggin and Paramount+ and AMC+ and Apple TV+ and FuboTV, timing them so they never overlapped and then, with an athlete’s discipline, turning off the auto-renew before his credit card was ever charged. That he then was obligated to binge as much television as humanly possible during each trial period, thus turning leisure into work, in no way detracted from his satisfaction at gaming the system.
Occasionally, when he wanted to watch something on a channel he’d recently canceled, I would let him use my information to sign up for a new account. This felt a little sneaky and a little fun, like helping ourselves to our sleeping children’s Halloween candy. It was something we could share.
It’s good when DVDs bring people together.
Though my brain was apparently hardwired to accept DVDs as a kind of Platonic ideal, I suspect this might not entirely explain their appeal. I suspect this because my home is already stocked with items I’ve acquired, sometimes at great inconvenience, from such a hodgepodge of eras, it would put Taylor Swift to shame. In the basement there’s the ’70s floor lamp with a built-in night table. That lamp is freaking genius—everyone says so. In the living room there’s the pair of Victorian chairs, upholstered in burnt-orange velvet; we had them shipped from my husband’s grandmother’s estate in Georgia. On a bookshelf in the dining room rests my father’s old brass spittoon, already antique when it came into his possession. My favorite is the ’60s Siesta lounger in our bedroom, the one that arrived from Denmark in a box light enough to convince my husband we’d been scammed. We hadn’t been scammed. That lounger is just so sleek and well designed—not a spare gram of anything—and so comfortable, it is nearly impossible to encounter it unoccupied by one warm-blooded creature or another.
Clearly, I’m someone who’s easily persuaded by the argument they just don’t make them like they used to. Clearly, I’m someone susceptible to the soothing pleasures of nostalgia.
Psychologists would approve. Talk to a psychologist and you will probably hear that nostalgia is a healthy coping mechanism for the stressors of life, that it aids with emotional regulation by sending forth positive memories (and plenty of dopamine) to combat loneliness. You might hear how nostalgic thoughts connect us to previous versions of ourselves, which is critical for maintaining a continuous identity. You might even hear nostalgia described as a bit of an ass kick, prodding us to rekindle old social connections or forge new ones. If you quite sensibly raise your eyebrows at this—what, you’re just going to, like, nostalgia your way to a dinner party?—that same psychologist might cite a study showing that when people are primed to feel nostalgic, they move their chairs an average of seven inches closer to a stranger for an upcoming conversation.
On closer examination, my neighbor’s pitch that the binder contained “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years” didn’t tell the whole truth. The movies in fact went all the way back to 1955’s Lady and the Tramp, and though among them were plenty of clunkers (Open Season, The Emoji Movie), all the major classics of my girlhood were accounted for: Aladdin, Toy Story, The Little Mermaid. Watching The Little Mermaid now with my daughters as we snuggle on the couch, the three of us singing along with Sebastian the Crab as he catalogs the merits of a life under the sea, I wonder: Would these DVDs feel so morally unassailable if my own childhood wasn’t so spectacularly represented in them?
Also, perhaps Sebastian doth protest too much. This crab sounds a lot like me going on about DVDs.
Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”
But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.
A lot of things seemed inevitable then.
I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.
I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.
Here in America, it’s the marketers who understand nostalgia best. The marketers understand that it’s nostalgia that drives us to eat the foods of our childhoods and adopt the hairstyles of flappers and hippies and acquire artifacts from our pasts, or our ancestors’ pasts, or even just random old stuff. The marketers understand why we fill our homes with antiques and raid secondhand shops for the perfect vintage jacket and still make ourselves cinnamon toast on a bad day. And then, when actual old things won’t cut it, the marketers swoop in to sell us Lisa Frank cases for our smartphones and “retro-style” dishwashers that are Whisper Quiet and energy star certified. The marketers can pinpoint, with thrilling specificity, just when the strange and disconcerting wrongness of the world is most likely to compel us to purchase a pair of JNCO jeans.
I think sometimes about my foray into vintage dishware. After reading an article about microplastics, I threw out all our plastic cups and plates and scavenged antique malls for pre-plastic equivalents: delicate porcelain pieces covered in charming floral patterns and pleasingly chunky milk-glass mugs, all cheap enough to pass along to even the clumsiest child.
We’d been using the dishes for a year before my brother informed me that older paints and glazes often contain heavy metals like lead. “You can buy these home test kits,” he told me helpfully. “When I did it on our old dishes, half of them were safe.”
The marketers can pinpoint, with thrilling specificity, just when the strange and disconcerting wrongness of the world is most likely to compel us to purchase a pair of JNCO jeans.
In lieu of further exploring just what fraction of my lovely dishes, intended to safeguard my children, had been slowly poisoning them instead, I loaded the lot of them into an old milk crate that I carried down to the basement, where I still do my best not to look at them. I later purchased a set of plates from Anthropologie: lead free and spanking new, but hand painted with an old-timey look, decorated with proper English springer spaniels, as if I might in fact live on a country manor and be expecting the likes of Mr. Darcy for tea. The marketers had me pegged.
Nothing is ever simple. Nostalgia protects and nostalgia poisons, and still we go back for more.
For several centuries, before its reputation was so thoroughly rehabilitated, nostalgia was considered a disease, akin to a depressive melancholia, experienced by soldiers fighting in far-off lands. As late as the American Civil War, a particularly dire case of nostalgia, however clumsily feigned, might earn you a quick trip home from the front lines. Next, doctors blamed nostalgia for “immigrant psychosis,” wherein despair for their homelands might drive newcomers to a kind of madness. Then psychoanalysts took a turn, tying nostalgia to regression and retreat: Can’t hack modern life? Why not just climb back into that nice warm womb? Nostalgia didn’t fare much better under a generation of historians who decried its tendency to distort and romanticize, making it the perfect political tool of regressive politicians. “Of all the ways of using history,” the historian Malcolm Chase memorably proclaimed, “nostalgia is the most general, looks the most innocent and is perhaps the most dangerous.”
Nothing is ever simple, you see. Before ushering us into the streaming era, Netflix was in the DVD-rental business. DVDs were the sturdy, unambiguously good stool the company stood on as it took swing after big, disruptive swing.
In our house, the backslide to streaming began with an individual movie: If our daughter wanted to shell out her hard-yanked tooth money on Moana 2, well, did she really need to wait three days for it to arrive in the mail? By then the weekend would be over. So we let her buy it from Amazon to stream instead. Just that once.
But it wasn’t just that once. Sometimes I would get so frustrated trying to find the remote that would let me switch the TV’s input over to the DVD player that I’d make my children stream one of the few movies we’d purchased from Amazon instead. Owning a few more movies we could stream that way seemed prudent. Like common sense, really.
In the end, I was the one who caved. After more than a year without streaming services (well, a year without paying for them, anyway), I was looking for something my younger daughter and I could watch together. I’d just started a new job, which left my soul tired at the end of the day; I needed something that spoke to both my daughter’s wildly competitive spirit and my own desire to stop thinking. We settled on The Great British Baking Show, a show itself steeped in nostalgia—my new Mr. Darcy plates would fit in nicely—where the contestants actually seemed to like one another and everyone was treated with kindness and respect. How quaint! How perfect.
It wasn’t available to rent at my library, though, and purchasing it seemed a bit extreme. Baking competitions are not exactly the kind of thing you watch on repeat. It was, however, available to stream on Netflix. So what did I do? I got out my credit card.
As parents, we want to protect our children from everything strange and disconcerting and wrong. We want to connect them to the past, our past, however real or imagined, distorted or romanticized. We buy them Goodnight Moon and Lincoln Logs so that our entire family might maintain a continuous identity.
My husband, a high school teacher, worries about his students. He worries about them growing up with their noses in their phones. He worries about them wanting to be influencers and trying to win big at sports gambling. He worries about their attention spans and their work ethic and their faith in the world. “We broke them,” he is known to say, and he is only half kidding.
He says this often to me and our friend Abby. Abby also works in education, and normally she nods along. But the last time we talked, she didn’t. “I wonder about that,” she said. “I wonder about that a lot. It’s an easy thing to think, but then I wonder if the kids aren’t doing exactly what they should be. Maybe we’re the broken ones, and they’re just preparing for the world they will actually inherit.”
There is the ship and there is the wreck, and maybe—maybe!—noses in their screens, they will dodge it yet. We need to believe this, and we need them to believe this, too.
There are days when, if my womb were large enough, I’d be pretty okay with my kids climbing back inside, just for the afternoon. There are days when I find it remarkable, truly remarkable, that I let my children so much as touch anything brought to market after about 1997.
But I must. And so, even as the bulging DVD binder fattens, I do.
A few songs that I listened to more than once in 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSJa1UytM8w&list=RDBSJa1UytM8w&start_radio=1
Saiyaara Title Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_1taX0Pvh4&list=RDW_1taX0Pvh4&start_radio=1
PYAAR AATA HAI - Rito Riba & Shreya Ghoshal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVhXWQAhyjI&list=RDsVhXWQAhyjI&start_radio=1
Dhinam Dhinamum | Viduthalai 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3I8TSUwLI&list=RD0Z3I8TSUwLI&start_radio=1
Hey Minnale | Amaran | Sivakarthikeyan, Sai Pallavi
Hindi TV Shows
Cricket
