Curating The Week: Millennial Whoops, Taste And Flavor, And The Postures Of Sitting


A brilliant article about the so-called “millennial whoop” in pop music.

“It’s a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A singer usually belts these notes with an ‘Oh’ phoneme, often in a ‘Wa-oh-wa-oh’ pattern. And it is in so many pop songs it’s criminal…The Millennial Whoop evokes a kind of primordial sense that everything will be alright. You know these notes. You’ve heard this before. There’s nothing out of the ordinary or scary here. You don’t need to learn the words or know a particular language or think deeply about meaning. You’re safe.”

An article about food that could just as easily be about music.

“But taste is not only about flavor. The word taste is derived from the Latin word taxare: to touch, to value, to judge. Its culinary meaning was secondary, overlaid. More broadly, taste also came to indicate a preference, and eventually a value judgment. The style of food preferred by European nobility began to change because spices were no longer in good taste…To understand that all good cooking is equal is to understand that all people are equal. We can change how we value flavor, by becoming aware of the roots of our biases, and by reaching beyond them.”

An article by Witold Rybczynski about the postures of sitting.

“We are good at walking and running, and we are happy lying down when we sleep. It is the in-between position that is the problem. This is true even if we sit on the ground—as attested by the variety of pads, bolsters, armrests, and cushions used by floor-sitting cultures. It is even truer when we choose to sit on a chair. Every chair represents a struggle to resolve the conflict between gravity and the human anatomy. Sitting up is always a challenge.”

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