The notion that intelligence is a measurable ‘something’ that is possessed by people in varying degrees is one of the ways in which we end up with an education system that fails the majority of those it is supposed to be helping. – 3 Quarks Daily
Month: September 2019
Can Card Tricks Make The World A Better Place? These Magicians Are Giving It A Try
Reporter Claire Armitstead talks to prestidigitators who use their craft to comfort children in refugee camps, restore movement to hemiplegia patients, assist in research on cognition; treat dyslexia and and symptoms of autism, and teach surgeons how to relate to their patients as human beings. – The Guardian
Are Bots Defining Your Aesthetic? (Of Course They Are)
“The intelligent software agents that you interact with online are ‘intelligent agents’ in the sense that they try to predict your behaviour taking into account what you did in your online past (e.g. what kind of movies you usually watch), and then they structure your options for online behaviour. For example, they offer you a selection of movies to watch next. However, they do not care much for your reasons for action.” – 3 Quarks Daily
There’s One American TV Show That Depicts Labor With Real Dignity
“On its face, [The Science Channel’s] How It’s Made is arguably about science and engineering rather than the vicissitudes of the working class, but its depiction of the everyday worker nonetheless makes it a kissing cousin to socialist realism — or at least a kissing cousin to social realism, which is itself a kissing cousin to socialist realism.” – The Baffler
How “Ulysses” Became A Scandal And Changed The Definition Of Obscenity In America
“The conspirators were Bennett Cerf, publisher and cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a cofounder of the ACLU and its chief legal counsel. The target was United States anti-obscenity law. The bait was a single copy of an English-language novel, printed in Dijon by Frenchmen who could not understand a word of it, bound in bright blue boards, and sold mail-order by the celebrated Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company.” – New York Review of Books
PBS NewsHour Visits Cambodia’s All-Gay-Male Classical Dance Troupe
“In 2015, artist Prumsodun Ok formed Cambodia’s first all-male and gay-identified Khmer dance company — in his living room. Part of his mission was to support the revival of an art form all but destroyed by the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Ok told his dancers they would need to be brave in order to give voice to a marginalized community. He shares his brief but spectacular take on honoring tradition.” (video plus transcript) – PBS NewsHour
Why Birds Have Been Such Powerful Symbols Throughout History
“Birds enter popular culture from the earliest times, and they continue to pervade literature and art throughout the classical period. They are mentioned in the very first sentence of European literature – as scavengers, at the start of Homer’s Iliad. They feature repeatedly in subsequent epic, lyric, didactic, pastoral and personal poetry, in tragedy and comedy, in epigrams and invective, and in prose writings on geography, history, travel, medicine and early science.” – Aeon
Peter Nichols, Playwright Of ‘A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg’ And ‘Privates On Parade’, Dead At 92
“Over a period of 15 years, from 1967 to 1982, [he] wrote some of the most brilliant and distinctive plays on the British stage. Yet he became sour and paranoid about the failure of the artistic establishment to pay him his rightful due.” – The Guardian
Baltimore Symphony Musicians File Charges With National Labor Relations Board
The unfair labor practices complaint charges that Baltimore Symphony management has failed to bargain in good faith, “unlawfully locked out the musicians … [and] failed and refused to provide relevant and necessary information requested by the union in bargaining.” – WBAL-TV (Baltimore)
Canceling ‘Cancel Culture’ — Would That Even Be Necessary?
“The best argument against cancel culture is that the whole thing is a myth, existing only in the furious minds of outraged social media users. People who are canceled usually don’t stay that way, and often the attention just fuels their success.” – Wired