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Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are the ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This “balance theory” suggests that people prefer works that are familiar, but not so familiar as to be boring; novel, but not so novel as to violate the expectations of their genre. We test this idea using a large dataset of fanfiction, a unique data source that mitigates many common critical shortcomings in the study of creative works. We apply a multiple regression model and a generalized additive model to examine how the recognition a work receives varies with its novelty, estimated through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model, in the context of existing works. We find the opposite pattern of what the balance theory predicts—overall success declines almost monotonically with novelty and exhibits a U-shaped instead of an inverse U-shaped curve. This puzzle is resolved by teasing out two competing forces: sameness attracts the masses whereas novelty provides enjoyment. Taken together, even though the balance theory holds in terms of expressed enjoyment, the overall success can show the opposite pattern due to the dominant role of familiarity to attract the audience. Under these two “forces”, cultural evolution may have to work against inertia—the appetite for consuming the familiar—and may resemble a punctuated equilibrium, marked by occasional leaps.

Arthur thinks his jokes about Sue Ellen's new sweater are all in good fun but Sue Ellen's feelings are hurt. Has Arthur become a bully? The Best Day Ever - It's a beautiful afternoon and everyone is reminiscing about their best days. Everyone, that is, except Arthur. Is it possible he doesn't have one?

After first-time author Nega Mezlekia won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction with his memoir Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: Memories of My Ethiopian Childhood, Anne Stone, an established Canadian writer, came out in the media with the claim that she had written all but 20 pages of the draft that went to Mezlekia’s publisher. This essay examines the authorship controversy that followed these allegations by teasing out the politics of time and authorship that underlie the controversy and textual level of Mezlekia’s memoir. It shows that the textual and extratextual dimensions of the memoir are loci of isochronic and allochronic forces that co-exist and clash on highly uneven terms in the contact zones of authorship, narrative form, textual narrative, and copyright. While this essay focusses on a specific case, its objective transcends this specificity in that it explores the positive potential of allochronic time as a force that complicates the modern legal and cultural notions of the imprinted author, of the space- and time-independent nature of print, and of an isochronic world in which everything happens at the same universal intervals of time.

In this cozy mystery, two New York state detectives try to solve a pair of cases while teasing readers about their romantic entanglement.

A short story is presented.

[Mike Daisey]'s inquiry into the lived experiences of these workers approximates through theater something like Karl Marx's de-fetishization of the commodity, bringing to light the otherwise invisible labor that goes into the things we buy. The dramatic center of the monologue is an account of Daisey's encounters outside the gates at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. He details conversations with factory workers who are pushed to the limits of human toil, reportedly working successive 12-hour shifts and sleeping in overcrowded dormitories, with as many as 15 bunks to a room. He recounts a conversation with a 13-year-old worker and another with a man whose right hand has been mangled by a machine and is part of an underground union. This story becomes the basis for a profound shift in Daisey's relationship with Apple and, ultimately, a plea to the audience to join Daisey in a concerted campaign to force Apple to do something about these deplorable working conditions. The lies involve details about what Daisey said he actually saw in China. \"As far as we can tell, Mike's monologue is in reality a mix of things that actually happened when he visited China and things that he just heard about or researched.\" For instance, Daisey claimed to have witnessed the overcrowded conditions at the dormitories, but his translator said they never went to the dormitories. He reported conversations with 12- and 13-year-old workers, but she said he only spoke with one girl who claimed to be 13 and never confirmed the age of her friends. The underground union members he met did not actually work for Foxconn, but for another company. He did meet a man with a garbled arm, but he fabricated a scene in which Daisey shows the man his iPhone, and the man looks at the device he made in awe, never before having held the finished product in his hand. As [Glass] put it, Daisy \"pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of workers who typify all kinds of harsh things somebody might face in a factory that makes iPhones and iPads.\" Many, including Glass, have argued that Daisey should have labeled his show fiction. I would agree, but only on two basic premises: one, that fiction doesn't mean entirely made up, and two, that we understand the politics inherent in the particular kind of fiction Daisey has created. The great 19th-century novelists like Balzac, Tolstoy, and even Dickens were critics of industrial capitalism, but they were also interested in teasing out the moral complexity of the system. Although parts of Daisey's show attempt to capture such complexities, the scenes in which he describes his trip to China do not. These moments belong instead to the tradition of melodrama and sentimental fiction. Think Uncle Tom's Cabin or Carmen. Like the characters in those works, the Chinese workers Daisey interviews become archetypes. Yes, they lack the complexity that is inherent in the actual attitudes of most Chinese factory workers. But Daisy is not a realist. Rather, he is a provocateur whose work prompts us to take heed of our own role in the global labor system.

As the youngest of three boys, Norman is used to bearing the brunt of his older brothers' teasing and roughhousing. But when all three enter a Doozy Dots contest to guess the number of candies in a jar and Norman wins $1,000, the satisfaction of beating them fills him with joy. Given the freedom to choose how to spend the money (although his parents have practical ideas), Norman generously opts to take his family to Miami Beach, Florida, for a real vacation. Once there, Norman encounters the legendary Mort Ziff, a stand-up comedian struggling to keep up with the changing times.

Masquerading as a novel, this latest from Polish experimentalist Tulli (Dreams and Stones, 2004, etc.) is actually a brain-teasing meditation on the conventions of fiction and the strategies of grammar. In an unspecified, presumably Eastern European city, in an unspecified ...

The enigmatic confluence of memory and imagination is explored with teasing subtlety in this 11th novel from Banville, the Irish author of such intensely stylized fiction as The Book of Evidence (1990) and The Untouchable (1997). The narrator and central ...

Victorine Louise Meurent, the young woman who posed for Edouard Manet's innovative, scandalous painting Olympia, among others, is placed at the center of Gibbon's observant work. In 1862, after an unnamed stranger enters the lives of Victo- riñe and her close friend, Denise, and begins a teasing, charged relationship with them both, she takes a courageous step, leaving behind her impoverished existence as a silver burnisher to pursue him solo.