Bad Taste, All in Fun

The ugly Christmas sweater; once an embarrassing piece of holiday-wear, and now a fashionable commodity.  But how did this occur? Guy Trebay, a culture and style reporter for the New York Times explains this strange epidemic.  With rhetorical questioning about the beginning of this style, Trebay explains that the true start of this holiday fashion epidemic has no real set beginning.  It might’ve started with the ugly sweater carols on Youtube, or the Ugly Sweater 5k runs, and goes on to an even longer list of possible causes.  It’s a trend that many online stores and brands are and have tapped into, an ironic host of all those old sweaters that an aunt or grandmother may have given and never worn.  All those ugly sweater parties with everyone trying to “one-up” each other with how ugly their sweaters were.  The article’s drawing from cultural memory, a memory of cheesy designs and horror, never giving a true answer to the question -when did this trend start?- but giving hints and reasons that may have all brought this epidemic over the tipping point into what is now a profitable tradition.  But I suppose the true purpose of this article is to show that all these cheesy designs and the remarkable tradition of wearing your ugly Christmas sweater is in fact, all for the fun of it.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/fashion/ugly-holiday-sweaters-are-all-the-rage-cultural-studies.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Photographer Says Death Photo was Attempt to Alert Subway Driver

This is an article about a subway-picture incident where a man was pushed onto the tracks of a subway and was then run over, while everyone else stood by and watched, and one photographer took pictures.  It is about the ethics of the pictures, and about why the photographer took them.  It was written by Michael Pearson, who graduated Emory University Professional Learning Program and University of Missouri-Saint Louis and is a freelance writer for CNN.  Using and interview with the photographer himself, Pearson paints the picture of what was going on at the scene, using liberal ethos with quotes from the photographer, Abbasi, of how he would have done things differently, and recalling how others urged the soon-to-be-dead man to move, to try to escape the subway train.  Pearson lets Abbasi speak with his writing, why Abbasi took the pictures -to get the subway driver’s attention, to do something productive- as well as the reactions to Abbasi’s pictures.  Using quotes from different people, Pearson presents the arguments for and against the publishing of the picture, which provoked an outcry from readers.  He raises the ethical concerns of the picture and its use.  So the question he leaves for us is, was this ethical? Or was this simply too private and insensitive?

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/05/us/new-york-subway-death/index.html

Wars of the Roses

The War of the Roses by Alison Weir, educated at the North Western Polytechnic as a history teacher.  She writes “popular” history, which is history aimed less to the scholar and more for the masses, using layman’s term and emphasizing narrative, personality, and detail rather than academic analysis.  After writing The Princes in the Tower, a popular history novel about last half of the Wars of the Roses between the Tudor and York families, Alison felt that she needed to write a prequel, about the first of the Wars of the Roses, between the Lancaster and York families.  Her main intention was to portray the human side of history - the people and their personalities, the main players in this feud (Weir xiii).  This is a story about not only the history of the Wars of the Roses; the causes, the facts, the analysis, but also the people; who they were, what they were like, why they did what they did.  With primary sources, Weir starts off with the events leading to and indirectly causing the Wars of the Roses.  The characters are portrayed, not as names, but as people, who had dreams, issues, personalities, hobbies, and lived in troubled and peaceful times.  Certainly, with her layman terms, she shares this rich history beautifully, making the characters seem more alive with choice events, such as the vivid death of the usurper King Henry IV.