“The idea of a coherent European culture is actually quite new. Scattered uses of the phrase appeared in the 19th century, but it was only in the 1920s and ’30s that the idea came of age. Those decades saw an unprecedented burst of attention for the idea of Europe, in which the age’s leading liberal intellectuals developed a compelling vision of the continent’s purportedly shared cultural identity.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Just What, Exactly, Is “Popular” Music?
Of the countless terms for categories of music, the least useful phrase I know is “popular music.” It provides no information about the music itself: no suggestion of how it sounds or what mood it might conjure, no indication of the traditions it grows from or defies, and no hint of whether it could be good for dancing, for solitary listening, or for anything else.
So Your Movie Was A Hit At Sundance? (You’re Still Not Going To Make Any Money)
“Most Sundance films these days are lucky to earn six figures at the box office — in total. For instance, the comedy “Wiener-Dog,” a follow-up to the 1995 indie hit “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” collected $470,575 last summer before arriving on Amazon. Have streaming and video on demand made up the art-house slack? Or even broadened the audience?”
UK Comedians Write Manifesto Against Free Work
“There is an alarming expectation that comedians will happily perform for expenses or even for free, without any promise of paid work in the future. This has created downward pressure on rates of pay and quality of working conditions for us all and can prevent participation by those with childcare and other responsibilities leading to a lack of diversity.”
Profanity’s Important Role In How We Express Ourselves
“Though research has not done much for profanity, the opposite is not true. Neurologists have learned a great deal about the brain from studying how brain-damaged people use swearwords—notably, that they do use them, heavily, even when they have lost all other speech. What this suggests is that profanity is encoded in the brain separately from most other language.”
Why Is Canada Cheaping Out In Commissioning Music For Parliament?
In an era when artists in general, and musicians in particular, are battling to get public understanding for their right to be paid, it is disheartening to learn that even the House of Commons just doesn’t get it. “Why on earth do people expect artists to do this kind of thing?” asks Montreal composer Simon Bertrand, who has organized an online petition requesting the award be raised. “When Parliament hires a plumber, do they tell the guy, come and work for free and then we’ll see what we think?”
Truth As A Commodity Is Problematic
“A technology that might have extended the field of dialogue, that might have brought distant cultures and persons into closer understanding, has contributed unexpectedly to their accelerated fragmentation. Years ago, Benedict Anderson wrote of the newspaper as an important technology of nationalist solidarity. The high politics of the nation, the sports news of the day, the freakish local weather all found places in its columns. A reader’s social imagination was, without any conscious intention, broadened to encompass them all. The very overload of information in our modern environment has helped to produce the opposite effect.”
If We Can’t Articulate Something We Think We Know, Do We Really Know It?
“If something is beyond words, then it’s hard to get a handle on what, if anything, it means. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, was convinced that it was nonsensical to try to speak about what lies outside the limits of language. Even so, he wrote an entire book about what cannot be said.”
What Happens When We Lose Our Faith In Statistics
“Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.”
Study: Smart People Like Morbid Humor
“A research team led by neurologist Ulrike Willinger of the Medical University of Vienna reports appreciating black humor “seems to be a complex information-processing task,” one that is facilitated by high intelligence and inhibited by bad moods.”