Introducing: My Current Cultural Diet, Vol 1.

Let's feast.

Trying something new! I hope you like it.

Sometimes I see / read / hear / watch / find things that don’t fit neatly into the SoE monthly themed framework. It might be tangentially related, or something I want to write about later in a larger way, but which I also want to share in the meantime. So I’m introducing this periodic feature: My Current Cultural Diet.

It’ll run in between larger themes, maybe every month (or every other month — whenever I accumulate enough stuff that I deem worthy of sharing). Some of it connects with a specific Sociology of… theme we’ve covered, but sometimes I just want to ask you to bask in its beauty with me. Some posts might skew more heavily toward articles, others toward music, and so on. If there’s a category you want me to add or something that I should check out, let me know. If any of these picks resonate with you, please chime in in the comments, because the point — as always — is for us to discuss and connect. For now, this feature is open to everyone, but it will be for paid subscribers only in the near future….

ARTICLES

• “Chat benches!” (WaPo): Writer Annabel Abbs-Streets spent a week visiting “chat benches” in a quest to talk to strangers. She was in the UK, but evidently there are chat benches all over the world. It’ll come as no surprise to SoE readers that I love this experiment and the very existence of chat benches thrills me. It feels like the perfect place for the kind of creative growth circle conversations I wrote about a few weeks ago. Years ago, I taught a course called “Global Issues in Design and Visuality in the 21st Century” at Parsons, which examined how design reflects and shapes culture. For their final projects, my students were asked to examine both the design elements and the social interactions on a particular New York City block. Their task was to introduce a new theoretical design element and hypothesize how that might shift the social dynamics of the space. The “chat bench” is a perfect example of a simple-yet-effective design augmentation with the power to transform behavior and connection. **If you’ve been to a chat bench or had any interactions while sitting on one, please share in the comments! I want to visit them allllll.**