Five favorites: Mickey Mouse in Ukrainian, open-air cinema, goosebumps – culture

goose flesh

The natural sciences like to research the background to even the smallest emotion. A study, which five cognitive and genetic researchers from European and British universities have just published, examined the causes of so-called “aesthetic shivers”. The main question was whether goosebumps when listening to music is more a cultural imprint or a genetic predisposition.

American researchers refer to the phenomenon with the French word “Frisson” because, in addition to the piloerection of the skin, it can also include tingling sensations, dilation of the pupils and tears. There are plenty of other studies looking at this. The simplest explanation is provided by “Contrastive Valence Theory” by the Canadian music and brain researcher David Huron, which states that breaks with expectations give goosebumps. This includes, above all, dynamic changes, regardless of whether they come suddenly or as crescendos.

Cognitive researchers Rémi de Fleurian and Marcus Pearce from Queen Mary University of London have in turn found outthat sad music works best. They also have a 66-hour Playlist of 715 tracks released on Spotify, which are supposed to trigger goosebumps. Most work quite well. Prince’ “Purple Rain” for example, this Allegro Moderato in Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” or that adagio from Rachmaninoff’s second. that Vivaldi, Metallica and Grönemeyer didn’t achieve anything in the self-experiment, proves the observation that “Frisson” is a subjective experience.

And what answer did genetics come up with? “Aesthetic chills are somatic markers of peak emotional hedonic responses. Evidence suggests that both personality and neurobiological factors may explain some of the observed fluctuations in chills.” Ah. So once again both are correct. Andrian Kreye

Welcome in Ukrainian: the “Mickey Mouse” special.

(Photo: Egmont Ehapa)

Donald in Ukrainian

That Mickey Mouse-magazine appears for the first time in Ukrainian. The Egmont Ehapa Media publishing house has published a free special edition with a circulation of 5,000 copies for children who have fled the Ukraine. A second edition with a further 3,000 copies is in the works. Schools and social institutions can request between 20 and a maximum of 50 copies from [email protected] (proof of the institution, address and contact person as well as the order quantity is required for the order). The Ukrainian Mickey Mouse-Magazine contains 36 pages of comics from Duckburg, plus the well-known mixture of jokes, tips and tricks. As Egmont Ehapa explains, it should bring refugee children “a bit of familiarity, joy and lightness in their new and still unfamiliar everyday life in Germany”. Martina Knoben

Favorites of the week: So beautiful here, you would also spend two hours looking at the silhouette of the city behind it: the "Film nights on the banks of the Elbe".

It’s so beautiful here, you could also spend two hours looking at the silhouette of the city behind it: the “Film Nights on the banks of the Elbe”.

(Photo: Robert Michael/picture alliance/dpa/dpa-Zentral)

summer cinema

Of course there are evenings that are harder to get through than to enjoy. When the cold pulls in from below or you’ve caught exactly the cracked one out of thousands of plastic chairs. Or when it rains and the person sitting around in front of you suddenly puts up an umbrella about the size of a space telescope. But these risks are just as much a part of summer cinema as the evenings when you want to embrace the whole world. With the now beginning film nights in Dresden, for example, one wonders every year in whose pockets all the ticket money ends up – but then one sits on the Königsufer, above a starry sky, in front of the huge screen, which, strictly speaking, does not exist need. So beautiful here, you could also look at the silhouette of the city behind it for two hours. Cornelius Pollmer

Favorites of the week: Suddenly everything is there at once: city, ruins, reconstruction.  And the war is very close. "Requiem for Kharkiv" in Berlin.

Suddenly everything is there at once: city, ruins, reconstruction. And the war is very close. “Requiem for Kharkiv” in Berlin.

(Photo: Dieter Nagelke/TU Berlin)

Kharkiv Requiem in Berlin

There is no shortage of solidarity actions with the Ukraine, but you rarely learn anything new about yourself from them. During the installation “Requiem for Kharkiv” on Berlin’s Ernst-Reuter-Platz it’s different. In the base windows of a restored building of the Technical University, the pictures of the Ukrainian photographer Stanislav Ostrous from his destroyed hometown can be seen until August 21: Ruins behind a gateway, the ruins of a palace Ostrous taught at the State Art Academy until the war, his subject was conceptual photography, but because the windows are small and the photos span several panes, separated by dark frames, depending on the light, one can guess the motifs more than that one recognizes them. And so Berlin enters the installation. The reflections of Reuter Square merge with Ostrous’ images of the destroyed Kharkiv. And suddenly the pre-war Reuter Square comes to mind with its axes and visions. Suddenly everything is suddenly there: city, ruins, reconstruction, and war is very close. Sonja Zekri

Favorites of the week: Smoking black mountains of ash from German plastic packaging: Turkish activist fighting illegal landfills, in "The recycling lie".

Smoking mountains of black ash from German plastic packaging: Turkish activist fighting illegal landfills in “The Recycling Lie”.

(Photo: WDR/Philipp Meise/a&o buero/WDR/Philipp Meise/a&o buero)

The recycling lie

That something was wrong with our idea of ​​​​recycling plastic was suspected at the latest when pictures went around the world a few years ago that proved that German plastic waste was not properly processed, as promised by politicians and corporations, but apparently in large quantities being dumped into the sea in Asia. Of course, that didn’t change anything in the system. Plastic waste is still diligently separated in private households. So that it does not simply pollute nature, but is fed back into the eternal cycle of recycling in a way that saves resources and the environment, in which old packaging is turned into new packaging using the latest magic technology.

Unfortunately, this is all nonsense. The ARD documentary “The Recycling Lie” by Tom Costello and Benedict Wermter shows this in a shockingly impressive and frighteningly sober manner. The facts, which are not secret and are probably quite unknown: Six million tons of plastic waste are produced in Germany alone every year. Less than five percent of it is actually recycled. According to Costello and Wermter, what is officially reported as 45 percent “material recycling” means above all, for example, that the old plastic is chopped up into small snippets and burned in cement factories. The factories get paid to do that. In addition, according to German law, exported waste is also considered recycled. What happens to it elsewhere is irrelevant.

Increasingly depressed and angry, one follows the film to its protagonists and around the world. For example, to be shown smoking mountains of black ash at illegal rubbish dumps in Turkey, from which half-burnt plastic packaging is pulled, which obviously comes from Germany. Or to see that even celebrated recycling companies like Terracycle, which – that’s all in the picture – have plastic waste neatly separated by volunteers in England in order to allegedly produce new high-quality things from it, have their “raw material” burned in Southeast Europe.

In other words: In a better world, the documentary would be shown to all students – and the government and Bundestag would watch it together. Until they finally bring themselves to do something that is at least more than one big lie. Jens Christian Rabe

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