Once upon a time, fairy tales were read to you at bedtime. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, maybe. As you’ve grown older, you might even have encountered books from this rising genre, that of fairy tale retellings, largely catered to young adults and adults. Prevalent over the past decade, more books—and even movies—are marketed annually as retellings of fairy tales….
Explaining a joke to someone sucks. Not only is it a struggle, but it also ruins the joke for everyone else. Yet, is there anything more human than knowing something is pointless and still doing it anyway? In that spirit, let us explore some prominent theories explaining jokes and humour, asking questions like why and when we laugh….
The fire had a vehemence to it; roaring with unmitigated fervour, echoing the chants of the Parsis in attendance. Although only present through teleconferencing, I couldn’t help but be enthralled by the prayer house as the prayers and chants commenced at the Parsi Zoroastrian Association of Singapore. The room was ornately decorated: the floor was covered with what seemed to resemble Iranian antique Persian rugs, and the walls were inundated with portraits of their transcendent creator deity, Ahura Mazda. Notably, the ornamentations that were used to furnish the prayer room shared a striking similitude—they all depicted the natural world….
Once a year, Associate Professor Hendrik Meyer-Ohle of the National University of Singapore flies his students to Tokyo to shop. Prof. Meyer-Ohle is not a fashionista with too much money and time on his hands—rather, he runs JS2880A, a class on Japanese fashion based almost entirely on fieldwork done in Japanese retail stores.
The Covid-19 pandemic throws a wrench in this arrangement. With restrictions on cross-border travel, Prof. Meyer-Ohle has had to come up with a new way to conduct these field studies. With his friends and collaborators Profs. Kazuo Kikuchi and Takahiro Nishi from Meiji University, they came up with the somewhat paradoxical “Virtual Field Study.”…
Listen to any conversation among adolescents today, and you will be sure to hear sentences peppered with “dudes” and “bruhs,” most likely meaning something slightly different each time. Upon further research, this fairly common observation of “dude”’s and “bruh”’s popularity and versatility has grounds in established sociolinguistic theories.
In 2004, before “bruh” in its current form emerged, linguist Scott Kiesling published an academic paper explaining the emergence of dude by young men in the 1980s and its continued popularity through the lens of conformity to hegemonic ideals of masculinity. In this article, Danan Lee from The Diacritic briefly describes the similarities between “dude” and “bruh” in order to demonstrate that his explanations apply strongly to “bruh” as well….
The Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace were established in Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel’s last will, signed on 27 November 1895, and an additional prize for the Economic Sciences was established later by the central bank of Sweden, Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968. Every year, the Nobel Prizes are awarded “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
In 2020, these prizes were awarded to eleven individuals and one organisation in recognition of their contributions to science, art, and world peace. Sadly, it is often difficult for non-specialists to understand just how significant these contributions are. To give some perspective to these achievements, The Diacritic’s Qian Zilan spoke to professors from Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore for their thoughts on this year’s prizes….