Mad Men November 23, 1963

Following the intense Mad Men episode in which President Kennedy was assassinated, my friend Mike forwarded me the link to this article from The New York Times. In the article, "On Nov. 23, 1963, Some People Really Did Marry," the NYT City Room tracked down three people who, like Roger Sterling's daughter, had their weddings scheduled for the day after the assassination.

“This could have been an awful day,” said the character Roger Sterling on Sunday night’s episode of “Mad Men,” speaking to a half-empty wedding reception. “But here we are, not watching TV, but together watching the two of you.” (See related Arts Beat post.)

The outcome of the Sterling wedding was hotly anticipated among fans of the show ever since this season’s second episode, which was broadcast Aug. 23. In it, Margaret Sterling, the daughter of one of the guys with his name on the door at the Sterling Cooper ad agency, shows her father, Roger, the freshly minted invitation to her wedding, still months away: Nov. 23, 1963. The camera lingered on the invitation itself, inviting reality to dawn on the audience. The date is one day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In real life, of course, no one saw this coming. Real-life brides-to-be had watched as the day they had been planning for months was pulled out of their control, and the nation’s grief and confusion — Was there a plot? Were others still at large? — threatened to drown out their wedding bells completely.

City Room called up The New York Times from Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, and had a look at the wedding announcements. Amid the pillbox-topped veils, the hair flips, the orchids and stephanotis, we found a few New Yorkers who were actually married the day the Sterling wedding was supposed to have taken place. At least some of the announcements were written before the actual wedding day, so there was no way of knowing whether every one of those weddings went off as planned.

To read the rest of the article by Michael Wilson click here

Baby Names

Baby names change with the winds of fashion and new research suggests the faster they get popular, the faster they get lame.

Take Tricia. Back in the 1950s, almost nobody named their baby girls Tricia. By the 1970s, the name had skyrocketed to the 144th most popular girl’s name and then just as quickly, Tricia fell back into disuse. It’s no longer in the top 1,000 names for girls. Literally hundreds of other names have followed similar trajectories.

It turns out that a name’s sad tumble into obscurity is tightly correlated with the speed of its rise. And that principle — what goes up quickly, must come down quickly — could be applicable to a broader set of memes.

“We don’t think this is just a names thing,” said Jonah Berger, a University of Pennsylvania marketing professor, and author of the study, which appears Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We think this is a broader phenomenon that happens in all kinds of identity-relevant domains where people care about what something means not just what it does.”

Berger’s paper follows earlier work by Harvard sociologist Stanley Lieberson, who used name databases as a way of analyzing the “pure mechanisms” involved in social and cultural fashion shifts. Lieberson argues that there’s no intrinsic value to the whims of fashion, be they hem lines or names starting with ‘J.’

“These are shifts where a new taste develops and it gradually expands and expands and expands. Because it is a fashion it eventually falls away and gets replaced by something else,” Lieberson told Wired.com. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”

The properties of the system arise just from the internal mechanics of popularity, a phenomenon that Lieberson calls “the ratchet effect.” New fashions rarely change wildly. They build on previous fashions, slowly changing through time. By this incremental process, new names become popular or skirts get shorter (or longer).

Berger’s addition is that the size of the increments matters, too, not just the absolute popularity of a name or fashion. Names that built up slowly through time also experienced greater overall success. The faddishness of fads, in other words, has been quantified.

“Things that catch on really quickly might end up less popular overall because they have a shorter life cycle,” Berger said.

For infinite fun playing with baby names, head to Baby Name Wizard, the data-heavy baby name site developed by Laura Wattenberg. Try the NameVoyager. You won’t be sorry (unless it causes you to miss a deadline).

via: Wired

Europe Explained

via: swissmiss

WWII POWs & Monopoly

Bet you didn't know this.

Waddington PLC, the printing company best known for its games including Monopoly, was involved in a most unusual venture during the Second World War: printing maps on silk, rayon and tissue paper for military use and smuggling some of them to prisoners of war.

[...]

During WWII hundreds of thousands of maps were produced by the British on thin cloth and tissue paper. The idea was that a serviceman captured or shot down behind enemy lines should have a map to help him find his way to safety if he escaped or, better still, evade capture in the first place. A map like this could be concealed in a small place (a cigarette packet or the hollow heel of a flying boot), did not rustle suspiciously if the captive was searched and, in the case of maps on cloth or mulberry leaf paper, could survive wear and tear and even immersion in water. The scheme was soon extended to cover those who had already been captured, although a certain amount of ingenuity was required to get the maps into the POW camps.

via: here