Stanley Fish: “[With] respect to a single demand – the demand that the methodological procedures of an enterprise be tethered to the world of fact in a manner unmediated by assumptions – science and religion are in the same condition of not being able to meet it (as are history, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and all the rest).”
Month: April 2012
Buddhism And Existentialism, Twin Consolations In The Face Of Death
“For existentialists and Buddhists, though in different ways, the relationship between the self and death seems more like the Late Night relationship between David Letterman and Paul Shaffer. One will be present if the other is too. You can be a full-fledged self, existentialists say, only if your death is ever present in your life. If you can manage to make your self disappear, Buddhists say, then death will as well.”
Stalin Museum Decides To Acknowledge His Atrocities
“A museum that has honored Josef Stalin in Georgia since 1937 is being remodeled to exhibit the atrocities that were committed during the Soviet dictator’s rule. Georgian Culture Minister Nika Rurua said Monday that his nation, which became independent in 1991, can no longer host a museum ‘glorifying the Soviet dictator’.”
Audience Member’s Lawsuit Against Bolshoi Opera Thrown Out
“A woman unhappy with Bolshoi’s controversial staging of [Glinka’s] Ruslan and Lyudmila opera was denied 1 million ruble compensation bid by Moscow’s Tverskoi court on Monday.” The plaintiff had sued over “the moral agony experienced when watching the performance.”
Biggest-Ever One-Week Album Sales Drop (Madonna Gets The Honor)
“After a promising start, topping the Billboard 200 chart in its first week with 359,000 copies sold, Madonna’s MDNA is expected to suffer an 88 percent drop in sales to 46,000 according to Forbes. The album’s steep decline would set the record for biggest second week drop in history.”
What Happened To Our Politically Adventurous Novelists?
“Some politically committed authors immediately come to mind, such as Dave Eggers – for his novels on Sudanese refugees and post-Katrina New Orleans, and his establishment of children’s reading groups – but the paucity of their number reinforces how few there are.”
Freedom Of Expression Is Meaningless If You Can’t Offend
“Censorship might be legitimate when a writer incites violence or war, but Gunter Grass’s poem does neither. His transgression is to write something that many people find offensive and (given his history, as a conscript in the Waffen-SS) deeply insensitive. However, this is no reason for censorship: freedom of expression is meaningless without the right to offend.”
The End Of DVD Stores?
“While niche independent stores have the best chance of survival, a report by market forecasters IBISWorld on DVD hire outlets proclaims the ”end of an era” for rentals. Industry revenue, which was $1.6 billion in 2008-09, will slump to nearly half that – $858 million – by 2016-17, the final year of the forecast, the report said.”
The Un-Choreographer
A leading exponent in Britain of physical theater, the genre that combines expressionistic, stylized, often unison movement with text, music and design, Hoggett is a choreographer who stretches the definition of the term. He’s never been a dancer and he has no technical training — he doesn’t so much design steps as elicit them from his performers.
Uh-Oh! Yahoo! Proposes Putting Ads In Digital Books
It suggests users could be offered ads as hyperlinks based within the book’s text, in-laid text or even “dynamic content” such as video. Another idea suggests boxes at the bottom of a page could trail later chapters or quotes saying “brought to you by Company A”.