Making Curriculum Pop

I really enjoyed this feature from the Pacific Standard built around the thesis that all news is weird news now. The article also gives a great history of the genre from 1800 to the present. Reading it made me want to create a unit with the essential question "Is all news weird news?" Sigh. 

Two interesting paragraphs:

But weird news is unique in that it really can’t exist without a gatekeeper. It’s a category defined by what it’s not, and by how one chooses to set the boundaries of what’s “normal.” The tastes of the old weird news purveyors said a lot about how they understood the concept, and the world. So as the genre grows in size and profit, it bears asking: What does mainstream weirdness even mean?

For at least a century, the genre of weird news has been driven by a pair of rival spirits—two theories of weirdness that co-exist but never jibe. First there are the satirists, the weirdness hunters who put their quarry in a circus cage: They point us at the characters they’ve nabbed so we can laugh at them together. Then there are the weirdness conservationists, the ones who see their subjects as members of a beautiful exotic species.

Full article @ http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/who-what-where-when-weird

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