Link Banana

I’ve not read a book in a while and I’ve not missed it. But a good magazine article, those I have missed in their absense. This one, from 1991, is a good one. Take, for example, this excellent bit on weeks:

The week mocks the calendar and marches relentlessly and unbroken across time, paying no attention to the seasons. The British scholar F H. Colson, who in 1926 wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, described the week as an “intruder.” It is an intruder that arrived relatively late. The week emerged as the final feature of what became the Western calendar sometime in the second or third century A.D., in ancient Rome. But it can be glimpsed in different guises—not always seven days long, and not always continuous—in many earlier civilizations.

And a bit about the psychology of weekends:

We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it too.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

…by barring them from popular culture(?!). Maybe it’s just me, but this thesis seems a little absurd:

And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

Having said that, I also didn’t know that chimpanzees are endangered. But I attribute it to insuffient publicity for that fact, not their presence popular culture.