Ripped from the Headlines: January 2020: This Week In Culture: January 4–10, 2020

Seke is a language spoken in five remote Nepalese villages. Only 700 Seke speakers remain in the world, and 100 of those live in New York City, half of them in one apartment building in Queens. Nepalese has largely pushed Seke out of its native region, and the surviving speakers wonder how long the language will last. Cloister comes from the Latin claustrum, meaning "lock" or "locked place." It's the same root as claustrophobia, a fear of enclosed spaces.

Usha Prabakaran self-published "Usha's Pickle Digest," a cookbook about traditional Indian pickles, over 20 years ago. The book became hugely popular, and is now available via print-on-demand from Amazon. Containing 1,000 recipes, it deals with a vast assortment of ingredients and techniques. It represents her determination to keep these recipes alive, and she's working on her second book, which will contain 1,000 recipes for rasam, a common soup with many variations.

The people behind Mall of America are building an indoor ski area in New Jersey. They're hoping that Big Snow, as it's called, will attract people who enjoy its convenience, affordable cost, and predictable year-round temperature of 28˚. Since New Jersey is the most densely populated state and right next to New York, millions of people are a short drive away and the developers are hoping that many of those people will want to ski in July.

Sonos is suing Google for stealing smart speaker technology from them. Google denies this, saying they developed the tech independently. But Sonos says that Google is violating their patents, so it doesn't matter if it's intentional or not. A grouse is a small, reddish-brown game bird, but as a verb it means "to complain" or "to grumble."

On January 23, Patrick Stewart will return to his role as the captain of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Picard. The show represents a darker, grittier view of the future, and is an effort to turn the Star Trek franchise into an endlessly expandable universe like Marvel. The show airs on CBS All Access, which already runs Star Trek: Discovery, another new show. Nadir is the opposite of zenith.

Bands with hit songs are increasingly being sued for stealing melodic or harmonic ideas from other, lesser known works. While plagiarism is definitely a problem, it can be hard to draw a clear line between theft and inspiration since so many pop songs have similar structures and tend to use simple chords. And since some of the legal judgements have been for millions of dollars, there's an incentive for artists to sue other artists if there's even a small similarity between tracks.

After a 20-13 upset playoff loss to the Titans, speculation among football commentators and fans was rampant that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady might retire. Brady said it was "unlikely" but didn't rule it out altogether. You could say he wouldn't commit either to staying or to retiring, which means he was noncommittal.

Phone maker OnePlus unveiled its Concept One. It has glass covering the cameras that darkens, hiding them. It looks cool, but the real utility of this feature is that the darkening glass also functions as a neutral density filter, which allows for taking pictures in blazing bright sunlight without blowing out any light areas. Opacus means "dark" or "shaded" in late Latin; we use opaque to mean the opposite of transparent. Opacity refers to how opaque something is.

The 77th Golden Globe Awards made some waves, but overall left a lot of watchers unimpressed. Netflix did badly; apart from wins by Laura Dern and Olivia Colman for Marriage Story and The Crown respectively, none of its high-profile movies or shows won. Amazon's Fleabag cleaned up, HBO won some, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood won best comedy movie. Host Ricky Gervais said he won't be hosting the show again.

Artist John Baldessari died at age 88. He helped create the field of conceptual art, and was hugely influential both through his work and his years of teaching at both UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts. He combined photography, painting, sculpture, and text to make work that was challenging, clever, mysterious, and sometimes funny. A whim is a spontaneous impulse, so something whimsical is more playful than useful.