Author: Douglas McLennan

What’s A Cultural Critic To Do? (Plenty, Actually)

“The radical potential of aesthetic negotiation relies, I think, on total freedom. Decoupled from government politics, cultural politics knows no bounds. But tweeting about an issue can encourage the critic (and her reader) to pick a stance, thereby helping to shore up the big pile of social-media meaning. Our space for aesthetic negotiation ends up laden with binaristic thought after all.”

Why Are We So Fascinated By Hermits Who Reject Civilization?

“Early cultures heavily emphasized the importance of communal bonding and obligation, urging the sacrifice of the self to the greater good. But while such bonding is necessary to keep civilizations alive, we’ve always prized those who rejected this: Outcasts like Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Jesus. And while the latter would become a fisher of men, his time alone in the desert would also in time inspire his followers: By the fifth century, the deserts of Syria were pockmarked with hermits, each looking for a little desolate wasteland of his (and occasionally her) own.”

What A City Sounds Like In Music Using Sounds Of The City

“The really important thing is that the musical ideas come out of the sound we collect. But the piece has a to tell a story; it has to exist for some reason.” Typical urban noise, like the revving of a car engine, the ringing of a bicycle bell, or the pitter-patter of pedestrian footsteps, can be found in virtually any city. So how do you make an audio portrait feel particular to the town it’s supposed to reflect?

Defending The NEA Unites Lincoln Center’s Arts Organizations

The groups — which generally get only very tiny fractions of their funding from the endowment — argued that the NEA serves an important function that goes beyond the dollars it distributes: attracting private philanthropy and “providing early funding to get projects off the ground or helping to create or expand promising initiatives to achieve greater reach and impact.”

Americans Are Choosing Smaller Screens To Watch TV On. What Will The Creative Implications Be?

“According to new data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, between 2009 and 2015, the number of American households without a single television doubled, from 1.3 percent to 2.6 percent. And even houses that still have televisions appear to be paring down: In 2009, 44 percent of households had three or more televisions, falling to 39 percent in 2015. The number of homes with one or two television rose 4 points in the same period, from 54 percent to 58 percent.”

Is Neuroscience Getting In The Way Of Figuring Out How Our Brains Behave?

“We still don’t understand how the brain works because we’re still ignorant about the middle ground between single neurons and behavior, which is the function of groups of neurons—of neural circuits.” And that’s because of “the methodological shackles that have prevented investigators from examining the activity of entire nervous system. This is probably futile, like watching TV by examining a single pixel at a time.”

What Studies Teach Us About Why People Ignore Incontrovertible Facts

“People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.”