Tag Archives: culture

White Paper: The Gig Economy and Executive Function: Structural Instability and Cognitive Impacts on Workers

Posted on December 31, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The gig economy has reshaped labor markets globally, offering flexibility, autonomy, and novel income streams. However, its lack of traditional structure presents unique challenges for workers’ executive function—the suite of cognitive processes responsible for planning, organization, impulse control, … Continue reading →

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

White Paper: The Third Thompson Twin: Joe Leeway, Visual Performance, and the Costs of 1980s Pop Stardom

Posted on December 30, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The popular memory of the Thompson Twins often reduces the group to a duo—Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie—especially in retrospective discussions. Yet during the band’s period of greatest commercial and cultural impact (1982–1986), the group was a trio, … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Music History, Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

White Paper: Custodial and Emotional-Regulatory Roles in Churches and Parachurch Organizations: Functions, Risks, and Institutional Blind Spots

Posted on December 29, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Churches and parachurch organizations rely heavily on two often underexamined categories of service: custodial roles (those that maintain physical, procedural, and operational order) and emotional-regulatory roles (those that stabilize communal affect, absorb tension, and manage social friction). These … Continue reading →

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

White Paper: Irony at the Edge: A Typology of Ironic Ages and Their Relationship to Civilizational Crisis

Posted on December 28, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Periods that elevate irony, ambiguity, and complexity to cultural ideals often coincide with moments of advanced institutional strain. This paper proposes a typology of “ironic ages”—historical phases in which societies celebrate detachment, layered meaning, and skepticism toward moral … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

White Paper: From Sincerity to Irony: When, How, and Why Criticism Came to Distrust Emotional Openness—and What This Shift Is Not

Posted on December 28, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Over the past century and a half, Western critical culture has undergone a marked transformation: emotional sincerity and openness, once regarded as indicators of moral seriousness and artistic authenticity, came to be viewed with suspicion, while irony, ambiguity, … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Musings | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gatekeepers, Ballads, and Misplaced Contempt: A White Paper on Starship, We Built This City, and the Cultural Misreading of No Protection

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary This white paper addresses two related and persistent anomalies in popular music criticism surrounding Starship and their 1985 album No Protection: Why “We Built This City” is routinely treated as one of the worst songs of the 1980s, … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Music History, Musings | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

White Paper: A Typology of New Wave Bands Based on the Precise Nature of Elements in Their Sound

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary New Wave is often described loosely as a post-punk, late-1970s–1980s genre blending pop accessibility with modernist aesthetics. Such descriptions obscure the fact that New Wave is better understood as a family of sound-engineering strategies, not a single musical … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Music History, Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Invisible Culture and Everyday Power

Posted on December 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Power is often imagined as loud: uniforms, proclamations, police lines, ideological slogans. Yet some of the most durable forms of power are quiet, ambient, and rarely named. They operate not through command but through expectation, not through force but through … Continue reading →

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

White Paper: Why Systems Expertise Is Mistaken for IT And Why Institutions Must Learn to Recognize It for What It Is

Posted on December 24, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Across contemporary institutions, individuals trained in systems thinking, engineering management, quality control, and process diagnostics are routinely misclassified as “IT.” This misclassification is not merely semantic. It distorts authority structures, obscures responsibility, leads to inappropriate task offloading, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Hidden Princes and Hidden Princesses: A White Paper on Unrecognized Noble Identity, Social Disconnect, and Contemporary Resolution Typologies

Posted on December 24, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Across myth, fairy tale, religious narrative, and modern popular culture, the recurring figure of the hidden prince or hidden princess expresses a deep and persistent human intuition: that one’s true worth, dignity, or calling is greater than what … Continue reading →

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment