#michael knox beran

[guy60660]

Anderson Cooper | Michael Knox Beran

#MICHAEL KNOX BERAN #anderson cooper

[nicklloydnow]

“These findings were later echoed by the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

In his body of work, Bourdieu described how “distance from necessity” characterized the affluent classes. In fact, Bourdieu coined the term “cultural capital.”

Once our basic physical and material needs are met, people can then spend more time cultivating what Bourdieu called the “dispositions of mind and body” in the form of intricate and expensive tastes and habits that the upper classes use to obtain distinction.

Corresponding with these sociological observations, the biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed that animals evolve certain displays, traits, and behaviors because they are so physically costly.

(…)

So for humans, top hats and designer handbags are costly signals of economic capacities; for gazelles, stotting is a costly signal of physical capacities.

Veblen, Bourdieu and Zahavi all claimed that humans—or animals—flaunt certain symbols, communicate in specific ways, and adopt costly means of expressing themselves, in order to obtain distinction from the masses.

Animals do this physically.

And affluent humans often do it economically and culturally, with their status symbols.

A difference, though, is that human signals often trickle to the rest of society, which weakens the power of the signal. Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it.

(…)

The yearning for distinction is the key motive here.

And in order to convert economic capital into cultural capital, it must be publicly visible.

But distinction encompasses not only clothing or food or rituals. It also extends to ideas and beliefs and causes.

In his book WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy, the author Michael Knox Beran examined the lives and habits of upper-class Americans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

He writes that “WASPS” had mixed feelings about their fellow citizens.

These upper-crust Americans viewed ordinary Americans as “sunk in moronic darkness” and that “It is a question whether a high WASP ever supported a fashionable cause without some secret knowledge that the cause was abhorred by the vulgarians.”

This still goes on today.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements.

But today, because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.

The upper class craves distinction.

(…)

A 2020 study titled “The possession of high status strengthens the status motive” led by Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley found that relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have a greater desire for wealth and status.

In other words, high-status people desire wealth and status more than anyone else.

(…)

Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances.

There are other examples of luxury beliefs as well, such as the downplaying of individual agency in shaping life outcomes.

A 2019 study led by Joseph Daniels at Marquette University was published in the journal of Applied Economics Letters.

They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.

Well, which belief is more likely to be true?

Plenty of research indicates that compared with an external locus of control, an internal locus of control is associated with better academic, economic, health, and relationship outcomes. Believing you are responsible for your life’s direction rather than external forces appears to be beneficial.

Here’s the late Stanford psychology professor Albert Bandura. His vast body of research showed that belief in personal agency, or what he described as “self-efficacy,” has powerful positive effects on life outcomes.

Undermining self-efficacy will have little effect on the rich and educated, but will have pronounced effects for the less fortunate.

It’s also generally instructive to see what affluent people tell their kids. And what seems to happen is that affluent people often broadcast how they owe their success to luck. But then they tell their own children about the importance of hard work and individual effort.

(…)

When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”

Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you.

When people express unusual beliefs that are at odds with conventional opinion, like defunding the police or downplaying hard work, or using peculiar vocabulary, often what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top university” or “I have the means and time to acquire these esoteric ideas.”

Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

To this extent, Pierre Bourdieu in The Forms of Capital wrote, “The best measure of cultural capital is undoubtedly the amount of time devoted to acquiring it.”

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education.

Members of the luxury belief class promote these ideas because it advances their social standing and because they know that the adoption of these policies or beliefs will cost them less than others.

(…)

Why are affluent people more susceptible to luxury beliefs? They can afford it. And they care the most about status.

In short, luxury beliefs are the new status symbols.

They are honest indicators of one’s social position, one’s level of wealth, where one was educated, and how much leisure time they have to adopt these fashionable beliefs.

And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.

But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else.”

#henderson #rob henderson #luxury beliefs #luxury #psychology #bourdieu #pierre bourdieu #veblen #thorstein veblen #zahavi #amotz zahavi #beran #michael knox beran #class #status #status symbols #peacock

[bigtickhk]

WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Knox Beran 

US: https://amzn.to/3kfTVPc 

UK: https://amzn.to/3gnvNJ6

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9781643137063

#Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy #Michael Knox Beran #us culture #us society #white privilge

[nexility-sims]

𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐦𝐞.

thanks for the tag, @funkyllama & @simming-in-the-rain !! i feel like there were other tags, so i’m sorry if i missed you asdjfhdskjg

favorite color: it varies. black is a mainstay, but i also love pink and deep, rich greens.

currently reading: i don’t read lmao but i’ve been making my way, at a painfully slow pace, through michael knox beran’s wasps and the final girl support group by grady hendrix. 

last song i listened to: well, i’m listening to “fresh blood” by eels right now.

sweet/savory/spicy: savory ! i have a killer sweet tooth, but savory is my favorite.

currently working on: technically, an article i’m writing about a murder case in 1757 ... but, my real project for the weekend is queueing as many story posts as i can :^) spring break is almost over, tragically, and i am determined to have at least several weeks’ worth of posts done before march 27th. we’ll see how it goes. building new sets for every single post is clown behavior, and yet here we are. 

tagging: anyone who hasn’t done it yet ! tag me so i can see, pls. 

#about n. #me a doctoral student: i'm illiterate actually—

[anightlikethis1985]

@bansheehaunt tagged me to share my reading plans for 2021! ty 🥺

i’m gonna set my goodreads challenge to 30 again— just barely made it this year. i’m not sure what all of those 30 will be, but i’m hoping to at least get to:

uzumaki, junji ito

murder by candlelight, michael knox beran

sense and sensibility, jane austen

bring up the bodies, hilary mantel

we the drowned, carsten jensen

i also really need to finish les mis bc i’ve been picking it up and putting it back down again for the better part of two years and now i’m about 80% through but i barely remember the beginning lol 😅

idk who to tag but u can totally do this and say u tagged me!! it would make my day 💕

[gaslightgallows]

Tagged by: @portraitoftheoddity

Rules: Tag [however many you’d like] people with excellent taste

Colours I’m currently wearing: This t-shirt, khaki shorts

Last band t-shirt I bought: I don’t think I’ve ever bought a band t-shirt.

Last band I saw live: The Hudson Valley Tinkers

Lipstick or chapstick: Chapstick.

Last song I listened to: Until We Meet Again, by Matthew Young

Last movie I watched: Uh, probably Rifftrax Live: Space Mutiny

Last three TV shows I watched: History’s Greatest Hoaxes, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

Last three characters I identified with: Oh, I’m bad at this... I can’t think of anyone, tbh. :(

Books I’m reading right now: Uncle Silas, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (which I really need to get on with) and Murder by Candlelight, by Michael Knox Beran.

Tagging: @rivendellrose, @mercurialbianca, @zombiecheetah, @loxxxlay, @omgimsarahtoo

#babbling gaslight #tumblr meme #adherents of the repeated meme

[bltrb]

Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre

Michael Knox Beran

Arguing that it is “less the quality of the crimes than the attitude of the age which determines the gruesomeness of its murders,” Michael Beran brings to life the ghastly ambiance of a vanished epoch, and gives us a terrifying glimpse of the horror beneath the seeming civility of the Romantic era.

In the early nineteenth century, a series of murders took place in and around London which shocked the whole of England. The appalling nature of the crimes―a brutal slaying in the gambling netherworld, the slaughter of two entire households, and the first of the modern lust-murders―was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight, but also by the efforts of some of the keenest minds of the period to uncover the gruesomest details of the killings.

These slayings all took place against the backdrop of a London in which the splendor of the fashionable world was haunted by the squalor of the slums. Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and others were fascinated by the blood and deviltry of these crimes.

In their contemplations of the most notorious murders of their time, they discerned in the act of killing itself a depth of hideousness that we have lost sight of, now living in an age in which murder has been reduced to a problem of social science and skillful detective work. Interweaving these cultural vignettes alongside criminal history, acclaimed author Michael Beran paints a vivid picture of a time when homicide was thought of as the intrusion of the diabolic into ordinary life.

[cinaed]

May 2017 Monthly Media

* = Rewatch/reread 

Anime/Cartoons

Bob's Burgers 7.19-7.21

Steven Universe 129-132

Books

Clean Sweep by Ilona Andrews

Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre by Michael Knox Beran 

Untamed by Anna Cowan 

Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher 

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me by Bill Hayes 

Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos

Angles of Attack by Marko Kloos  

Chains of Command by Marko Kloos 

Fields of Fire by Marko Kloos 

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie* 

Future Leaders of Nowhere by Emily O'Beirne 

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo - and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry

The Lawrence Browne Affair by Cat Sebastian 

Beast by Brie Spangler  

All Systems Red by Martha Wells 

Manga/Comics

Kuroko's Basketball Volumes 7-10

Dumbing of Age (ongoing webcomic) 

Oglaf (ongoing webcomic) 

The Otherknown (ongoing webcomic) 

Stand Still, Stay Silent (ongoing webcomic)

Strong Female Protagonist (ongoing webcomic) 

Wilde Life (ongoing webcomic) 

Movies

Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King (2017) 

Theater

Footloose (Franklin Arts Center) 

Or (Round House Theater)

Ragtime (Ford's Theatre) 

Timon of Athens (Folger Theater) 

TV Shows/Web Series/Podcasts

The Adventure Zone 62-64

Anne with an E 1.01-1.02

Brooklyn Nine Nine 4.16-4.22 

Chopped Junior 1.01-1.10 

Critical Role 96-99

Elementary 5.19-5.24

Fresh Off the Boat 3.21-3.23 

Great News 1.01-1.10

Masterchef Junior 5.10-5.15

The Penumbra Podcast 2.03-2.05

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 4.07-7.26

Superstore 2.22

Timeless 1.01-1.16

Trial & Error 1.01-1.13 

Underground 1.01-1.02 

#monthly media

[universitybookstore]

From Pegasus Crime (W. W. Norton & Co.) and historian Michael Knox Beran, comes Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre.

#books #murder by candlelight #michael knox beran #pegasus crime #w. w. norton #true crime #history #england #murder #new books #new releases

[nexility-sims]

GET TO KNOW ME TAG.

thank you for the tag, @pinkwohoo !!! i love these

𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐬: BLACK. also pink, but ... separately.

𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠: LMAO. i don’t read sdfkjgld i’m reading robin beck’s chiefdoms, collapse, and coalescence in the early american south for class. the “leisure reading” books i purchased recently are michael knox beran’s wasps (beautifully written, good inspo for my story / sims legacy, but also too much cold war foreign policy for my taste) and grady hendrix’s the final girl support group (we love a final girl, period). perhaps some day i will finish them.

𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨: well, i’m listening to my brand new beatriz playlist as i do this, so ... several 🔥 songs. :^)

𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝: i’m rewatching “community” (who have i become??) but the last new series i watched was “why women kill.” it’s incredible ! also story inspo, but you didn’t hear that from me 

𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭, 𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐲 𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐲? savory ! spicy things don’t like me, though i like them, and i always think i like sweet things more than i do after the fact... me, side-eyeing the chocolate chip cookie dough i just bought sdhjfskgf

𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠: more sunchips >:^) the cheddar variety

𝐭𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐞? both ! i drink coffee way more often, tho. unsweetened with almond milk, unless it’s a chocolate almondmilk shaken espresso from starbucks or an unsweetened (iced) latte. i’m a southerner, so my favorite type of tea is sweet & iced :^) but, i also like hot tea (herbal, w/o sugar unless there’s also mint involved; honey if it’s just black tea w/o mint).

𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧: erm... i SHOULD be queueing story posts & working on the wedding BUT i’m feeling a lot of inspiration today and might just do some storyboarding for part iii / iv instead ...................... ???? the drama rattling around my head needs to be released. recently learned all the cool kids are using milanote, so i reckon i’ll figure it out now !!!!!!!!!!!

i am tagging ... well, i don’t know how many of my favorites have done it already so dskjflhs let’s just say anyone of you who hasn’t done this yet & wants to !! 

pls tag me so i can see your answers 😘

#about n. #tag game