Latest news with #AnnaKarenina
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Caught on the jumbotron: How literature helps us understand modern-day public shaming
The scene at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts on July 16 was steeped in irony. During Coldplay's 'jumbotron song' — the concert segment where cameras pan over the crowd — the big screen landed on Andy Byron, then-CEO of data firm Astronomer, intimately embracing Kristin Cabot, the company's chief people officer. Both are married to other people. The moment, captured on video and widely circulated on social media, shows the pair abruptly recoiling as Coldplay's lead singer Chris Martin says: 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.' Martin's comment — seemingly light-hearted at the time — quickly took on a different tone as online sleuths identified the pair and uncovered their corporate roles and marital statuses. Within days, Byron resigned from his position as CEO while Cabot is on leave. This spectacle raises a deeper question: why does infidelity, especially among the powerful, provoke such public outcry. Literary tradition offers some insight: intimate betrayal is never truly private. It shatters an implicit social contract, demanding communal scrutiny to restore trust. When trust crumbles publicly French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's notion of 'narrative identity' suggests we make sense of our lives as unfolding stories. The promises we make (and break) become chapters of identity and the basis of others' trust. Betrayal ruptures the framework that stitches private vows to public roles; without that stitch, trust frays. Byron's stadium exposure turned a marital vow into a proxy for professional integrity. Public betrayal magnifies public outcry because leaders symbolize stability; their personal failings inevitably reflect on their institutions. When Astronomer's board stated the expected standard 'was not met,' they were lamenting the collapse of Byron's narrative integrity — and, by extension, their company's. This idea — that private morality underpins public order — is hardly new. In Laws, ancient Greek philosopher Plato described adultery as a disorder undermining family and state. Roman philosopher Seneca called it a betrayal of nature, while statesman Cicero warned that breaking fides (trust) corrodes civic bonds. The social cost of infidelity in literature Literature rarely confines infidelity to the bedroom; its shockwaves fracture communities. French sociologist Émile Durkheim's idea of the 'conscience collective' holds that shared moral norms create 'social solidarity.' As literature demonstrates, violations of these norms inevitably undermines communal trust. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-77) dramatizes the social fracture of betrayal. Anna's affair with Count Vronsky not only defies moral convention but destabilizes the aristocratic norms that once upheld her status. As the scandal leads to her ostracization, Anna mourns the social world she has lost, realizing too late that 'the position she enjoyed in society… was precious to her… [and] she could not be stronger than she was.' In Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Emma Bovary's extramarital affairs unravel the networks of her provincial town, turning private yearning for luxury and romance into public contagion. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) makes this explicit: Hester Prynne's scarlet 'A' turns her sin into civic theatre. Public shaming on the scaffold, the novel suggests, delineates moral boundaries and seeks to restore social order — a process that prefigures today's 'digital pillories,' where viral moments subject individuals to mass online judgment and public condemnation. Domestic crumbs and digital scaffolds Contemporary narratives shift the setting but uphold the same principle: betrayal devastates the mundane rituals that build trust. Nora Ephron's autobiographical novel Heartburn (1983), based on her own marriage's collapse to investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, weaponizes domesticity. Heartburn's protagonist Rachel Samstat delivers her emotions through recipes — 'Vinaigrette' as a marker of intimacy and betrayal, 'Lillian Hellman's Pot Roast' as a bid for domestic stability and 'Key Lime Pie,' hurled at her cheating husband — become symbols of a life undone by public infidelity. Ephron's satire, later adapted into a film, anticipates our digital age of exposure, where private pain fuels public consumption and judgment. Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (2014), which draws from her own life, shows another perspective: betrayal as quiet erosion. Offill never depicts the affair directly; instead, the husband's absences, silences and an off-hand reference to 'someone else' create a suffocating dread. This indirection shows betrayal's power lies in its latent potential, slowly dismantling a life built on trust before any overt act. Both works underscore betrayal's impact on the collective conscience: a lie fractures a family as fundamentally as a CEO's indiscretion erodes institutional trust. Power magnifies the fallout by turning private failings into public symbols of fragility. Even hidden betrayal poisons the shared rituals binding any group, making the notion of 'private' unsustainable long before any public revelation. The limits of power Literature acknowledges power's protective veneer from consequence — and its limits. Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire (1912–47), modelled on the Gilded Age robber baron Charles Yerkes, follows the rise of financier Frank Cowperwood, whose power shields him — until it doesn't. Even his vast empire proves vulnerable once his adultery becomes public. The very networks that protected him grow wary. Though many critics of the elite are themselves morally compromised in the trilogy, Cowperwood's transgression becomes a weapon to discredit him. His brief exile shows that power may defer, but cannot erase, the costs of betrayal. Once trust fractures, even the powerful become liabilities. They do not fall less often — only more conspicuously. Gender also plays a role in shaping these narratives. Male protagonists like Cowperwood rebound as tragic anti-heroes, their moral failings recast as flaws of character. By contrast, women — think Flaubert's Emma Bovary or Hawthorne's Hester Prynne — are branded cautionary figures, their transgressions stigmatized rather than mythologized. This imbalance in assigning consequences reveals a deeper societal judgment: while broken trust demands repair, the path to restoration often depends on the transgressor's gender. The unblinking eye From Tolstoy's salons to TikTok's scroll, literature offers no refuge from betrayal's ripple effects. When private trust visibly fractures, communal reflexes kick in. Scarlet letters, exile or a CEO's resignation all aim to heal the collective trust. The jumbotron, like Hester's scaffold, is the latest instrument in this age-old theatre of exposure. Jumbotrons. Scaffolds. Same operating system. Same shame. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jason Wang, Toronto Metropolitan University Read more: 'Eat the rich' — Why horror films are taking aim at the ultra-wealthy TikTok may be bad for privacy, but is it also harming our cognitive abilities? Citizens' social media, like Mastodon, can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation Jason Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Esi Edugyan Has a Long List of Canadian Writers to Recommend
In an email interview, the Vancouver Island-based novelist described why being a Booker Prize judge turned out to be surprisingly 'exhilarating.' SCOTT HELLER What's the last great book you read? 'Change,' by Édouard Louis. He writes about how the abandonment of modest roots for a more privileged life can enact a kind of violence on intimate relationships. I read everything he writes. What's your go-to classic? I was 18 when I started reading 'Anna Karenina,' and I continue to read it every few years. I remember how grown up and worldly the characters once seemed. Now they are all so young! Your favorite book no one else knows? 'The Cave,' by the Dutch author Tim Krabbé, is an elegant puzzle of a novel. Do books serve a moral function? How so? They can, but they shouldn't set out to. When readers open themselves up to the intensity of another's experience — even that of an invented person — it can be transformative. Books can leave you feeling less singular, strange and alone, but they can also expose you to a way of being that is completely alien to you, against which to measure your own choices. Novels that are written with a pointed moral or a message are not novels. They are propaganda. Do you consider yourself a writer of historical fiction? Every time I describe myself as a writer of historical fiction, I feel an inward cringe as I sense those unfamiliar with my work picturing scenes of ripped-off bodices and men riding horses across twilit downs. Inevitably when I'm asked again, my reply is always the same. Something in that description must feel true. But I chafe against it. When 'Washington Black' came out, you told The Times that it would be 'daunting' to write a novel set in the present. Are you getting closer to trying? The temptation is still to look to parallels in the past for what's going on now. The past has contours the present simply doesn't possess for me; its throughlines feel more easily grasped and wrestled into a kind of shape. But I think it's probably an important skill to be able to confront the moment as it now appears, somehow. What surprised you most about chairing the Booker Prize panel in 2023? What a healthy state literature is in. You can only hear that the novel is dying so many times before you start to feel cynical about the whole enterprise. Paring down the list became excruciating — our jury had many rigorous conversations from which we all mercifully emerged with our limbs still intact. It was a fascinating, combative, respectful, exhilarating experience. What surprised you most about seeing 'Washington Black' adapted for television? I was struck by how much more externalized the storytelling has to be. This would seem an obvious fact, but it can still surprise you. Because characters' inner worlds can't be accessed as readily, everything must be recreated as surface, as something that can be gleaned visually. And so the set design is ferociously intricate, and multitudes are expressed in a glance or a grimace or the way a masterful actor carries her body. In a novel, the writing is everything. In a series or a film, it is one thread of a larger netting. Tell me about western Canadian writers the wider world should know more about. Patrick Lane was one of our greatest poets — his work is in many ways evocative of Cormac McCarthy. Also wonderful are the short stories of Tamas Dobozy and the novels of Patrick deWitt; Michael Christie's era-spanning 'Greenwood'; Jasmine Sealy's epic 'The Island of Forgetting'; Steven Price's elegant 'Lampedusa'; the beautiful poetry of Lorna Crozier and Jan Zwicky. For canonical works, I'd suggest Sheila Watson's high modernist novel 'The Double Hook,' Jack Hodgins' Vancouver Island stories 'Spit Delaney's Island,' and Joy Kogawa's 'Obasan,' about the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. How do you organize your books? I recently moved house, so my entire book collection is unfortunately boxed in my garage! When I get the shelving up, I'll again arrange things alphabetically, and also by genre. It's the only way to find anything when you've got over 10,000 books. What's the last book you read that made you laugh? Kevin Wilson's 'The Family Fang' is an utter delight. Katherine Heiny's 'Single, Carefree, Mellow' was also a singular pleasure. What books are on your night stand? Ben Lerner's exquisite '10:04,' which I've somehow only just come to; James Fox's 'The World According to Color: A Cultural History'; Percival Everett's 'James'; Alan Hollinghurst's 'Our Evenings'; Katie Kitamura's 'Audition'; and Donatella Di Pietrantonio's 'The Brittle Age.' What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? I've never been able to finish 'Moby-Dick,' an admission made all the more dreadful for the fact that it is my partner's favorite novel. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Leo Tolstoy, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante — though I fear Tolstoy might spend the evening lecturing us on the world's ills.
Scientific American
21-07-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Optimists Are Alike, but Pessimists Are Unique, Bran Scan Study Suggests
'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' This is the first line of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, and it may hold a kernel of truth that goes beyond family dynamics. In a recent study of optimism, neuroscientists found an equivalent principle at play: optimists shared similar patterns of activity in a key brain region when they imagined future events, but each pessimist's brain patterns was unique. The results help neuroscientists understand what distinguishes optimism from pessimism in the brain. This is an important question because optimism is associated with better physical, mental and social health. The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 'We tend to think of imagining the future as a deeply personal, subjective act,' says Kuniaki Yanagisawa, the study's lead author and a psychologist at Kobe University in Japan. 'Our study, however, shows that—especially for optimists—the way our brains do this can be similar' and suggests that such shared cognitive frameworks for imagining the future might explain why we 'click' with some people, he says. Prior studies have shown that optimists have larger social networks and higher acceptance by their peers. Yanagisawa wanted to understand 'whether this social success is just about personality,' he says, 'or if optimists might share a fundamental brain mechanism that makes it easier for them to form social connections.' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The researchers scanned participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine while they imagined specific future events happening to either them or their spouse. Some of the events were positive; others were neutral or negative. Afterward the team had the participants take a questionnaire to determine their level of optimism or pessimism. The researchers conducted the study twice, once in a group of 37 participants and again in a group of 50. To analyze the brain scans, the researchers zoomed in on one region that's particularly active while imagining future events: the medial prefrontal cortex, located in the middle of the very front of the brain. They compared patterns of brain activation in each possible pair of participants and used statistical tests to determine how similar the activations were to each other in these pairs. The team found that only pairs consisting of two optimistic participants had similar brain activation; pairs where one or both participants were more pessimistic were dissimilar to each other. The researchers also found that optimistic people showed bigger differences between brain patterns for emotionally positive and negative events than pessimists did. A few prior studies of 'positive' social traits have shown similar results. A 2022 brain scan study showed that people who held a central position in their social network have similar activation patterns to one another—but that less central people had a lot of individual differences, or idiosyncrasies. The same pattern held true in another study of people with low versus high levels of loneliness. Elisa Baek, a social neuroscientist now at the University of Southern California and lead author of those two studies, refers to these results as examples of the ' Anna Karenina principle,' the idea that successful endeavors have similar characteristics but that unsuccessful ones are each different in their own way. 'One intriguing interpretation [of the optimism study], consistent with the Anna Karenina principle, is that there may be many different ways for a person to be pessimistic, while optimistic people tend to converge on a few shared mental models of a hopeful future,' Baek says. Together, these studies 'may point to a more general principle—that being 'on the same page' as others is a foundational mechanism that underlies the experience of social connection.' If there is an Anna Karenina principle at work for positive social traits, what would be causing it? After all, the traits we deem 'positive' vary greatly among different societies, so there's a risk of cultural bias. Yanagisawa thinks that these cultural values could actually be driving the effect—they orient people toward a specific goal that is valued in a society, such as being optimistic or having a lot of social connections, perhaps leading those individuals to behave and think similarly over time. It's also possible that optimism, as measured in this study, is picking up on related traits such as people's level of loneliness or position in a social network. 'These convergent findings raise an important question about the overlap between constructs such as optimism, loneliness and network centrality,' Baek says. 'Because the new study didn't control for loneliness or social network position, and my prior work didn't control for optimism, it is unclear how much these dimensions are overlapping or distinct.' Optimism and pessimism aren't unchanging traits; they tend to shift with age, although the trajectories vary from culture to culture. Nor is optimism an unquestioned good. 'Extreme optimism might not always be a good thing because we might not plan for the future as well as we should,' says Aleea Devitt, a psychologist at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, who studies future thinking. And 'pessimism may be a useful 'positive' trait in some situations; there's evidence that some people can be defensive pessimists, which can actually help them better prepare for the future.'
Sydney Morning Herald
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Too busy to read to children? You're missing out on one of life's greatest joys
Have you heard the voice I do for the mouse in The Gruffalo children's book? I've based it on that of Kenneth Horne from Round the Horne, who I realise is not so well known these days. But the voice is just perfect for the character of that brave little mouse. Oh my God, I love reading aloud. My dreams of being an actor may have ended in tears at age 16, but with a children's book in hand, I have a renewed chance to perform. The criticism my acting always received in school productions – 'far too big, can't you tone it down a little?' – appears no impediment to applause from this particular audience. Who doesn't like reading books to kids? Lots of people, according to a new survey which also found 30 per cent of NSW parents and 22 per cent of Victorian parents say they're too busy to read daily to their children. It fits with a recent UK study finding that reading aloud to children is at an all-time low. Fewer than half of 0-to-4-year-olds are read to frequently, and fewer than half of parents of children under 13 said reading aloud to children was 'fun for me'. 'Fun for me' is precisely the phrase I'd use, whether it's the memories of reading to my own children decades ago or reading to those children's children. Often the same books, the pages all torn and tatty. What's so good about reading aloud? The child, for once, is sitting still. Not tearing up and down the hallway on a tricycle, not painting bunny rabbits on the wall with Texta, not using the drawer handles as a ladder to clamber onto the stove-top, searching for the ignition. Instead, they are sitting calmly, head leaning on your shoulder, entranced. What's not to love? Repetition, to be fair, can be an issue. Jemima and Big Ted's mission to the moon has an engaging plot based on the International Space Station running out of honey, which apparently is a real problem. It's a favourite with the current lot and, if you'll forgive a moment of vanity, I think my Big Ted voice is quite compelling. On the other hand, is it worth reading 4371 times, when I've only read Anna Karenina twice? The Big Ted story is new to our collection, but other books are like a time machine. You sit there with a child on your knee, reading Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, or CJ Dennis' A Book for Kids, or Margaret Wild's Toby – same copy, same knee, same time-tested accents. It may be life's only way to make 30 years disappear.
The Age
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Too busy to read to children? You're missing out on one of life's greatest joys
Have you heard the voice I do for the mouse in The Gruffalo children's book? I've based it on that of Kenneth Horne from Round the Horne, who I realise is not so well known these days. But the voice is just perfect for the character of that brave little mouse. Oh my God, I love reading aloud. My dreams of being an actor may have ended in tears at age 16, but with a children's book in hand, I have a renewed chance to perform. The criticism my acting always received in school productions – 'far too big, can't you tone it down a little?' – appears no impediment to applause from this particular audience. Who doesn't like reading books to kids? Lots of people, according to a new survey which also found 30 per cent of NSW parents and 22 per cent of Victorian parents say they're too busy to read daily to their children. It fits with a recent UK study finding that reading aloud to children is at an all-time low. Fewer than half of 0-to-4-year-olds are read to frequently, and fewer than half of parents of children under 13 said reading aloud to children was 'fun for me'. 'Fun for me' is precisely the phrase I'd use, whether it's the memories of reading to my own children decades ago or reading to those children's children. Often the same books, the pages all torn and tatty. What's so good about reading aloud? The child, for once, is sitting still. Not tearing up and down the hallway on a tricycle, not painting bunny rabbits on the wall with Texta, not using the drawer handles as a ladder to clamber onto the stove-top, searching for the ignition. Instead, they are sitting calmly, head leaning on your shoulder, entranced. What's not to love? Repetition, to be fair, can be an issue. Jemima and Big Ted's mission to the moon has an engaging plot based on the International Space Station running out of honey, which apparently is a real problem. It's a favourite with the current lot and, if you'll forgive a moment of vanity, I think my Big Ted voice is quite compelling. On the other hand, is it worth reading 4371 times, when I've only read Anna Karenina twice? The Big Ted story is new to our collection, but other books are like a time machine. You sit there with a child on your knee, reading Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, or CJ Dennis' A Book for Kids, or Margaret Wild's Toby – same copy, same knee, same time-tested accents. It may be life's only way to make 30 years disappear.
