“Feeling a range of real emotions for fictional events is so commonplace we don’t often think to question it. But why should we get emotionally involved with characters and situations that we know are not real? Why should we get scared by something we know is only a movie? This is the paradox of fiction.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Our Brains Fill In The Blanks Of Ambiguity To Create Beliefs
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett: The structure of the brain is such that there are many more intrinsic connections between neurons than there are connections that bring sensory information from the world. From that incomplete picture, she says, the brain is “filling in the details, making sense out of ambiguous sensory input.” The brain, she says, is an “inference generating organ.” She describes an increasingly well-supported working hypothesis called predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world. There would otherwise simple be too much sensory input to take in.
Poetry Isn’t Dying. Poets, On The Other Hand…
“Not only is it not endangered, it will outlast any number of species of living things on the face of the earth. It will only perish with our own. I worry about journalism. I don’t worry about Poetry. Being a poet is a more complicated matter.”
The Illusion Of Choice On Netflix (And Why It’s Bad For Movie-Lovers)
“The service has 47 million subscribers in the United States, and its movie library is affected not only by the limitations of particular licensing deals, which means that the number of titles is constantly contracting and expanding, but also by what subscribers actually watch. To use the contemporary buzzword “curated,” Netflix would argue that it does indeed take a curatorial approach to movies, but one that’s appropriate to a consumer product rather than a museum. It does not see its mission as a conservational one. And the hard truth about the future of streaming services is that even those with the loftiest stated ambitions will be obliged to balance those ambitions against market demand.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Opera Debut At The Kennedy Center
The Supreme Court justice made her official opera debut on Saturday night at the Kennedy Center — after a scattering of supernumerary roles in the past — as the Duchess of Krakenthorp, a small spoken part.
Did The Arts Fail To Help Make The Kind Of Country We Should Be?
“Theater, and art in general, have the power to change the world. And way too many of us relinquished that power in service of preserving our donor base and protecting white fragility. We used our power to produce Miss Saigon. We used our power to produce The Mikado. We used our power to enable blackface, brownface, redface, cripface and yellowface. We used our power to victimize women. We used our power to produce multiple stories about white people lamenting to other white people about how the world is changing in front of audiences of white people. We used our resources to keep our lights on and our heads down while ignoring the small-handed, bloviating barbarian at the gate. And now he is here and we are “shocked.” Why? We built this.”
ISIL Has Bulldozed Ancient 2,900-Year-Old Nimrud Ziggurat
Only the largest Egyptian pyramids are higher than Middle Eastern ziggurats and central American step pyramids. The Nimrud ziggurat was apparently bulldozed and pushed into the ancient bed of the Tigris river.
This Week’s AJ Highlights: Divided Culture, Audience Issues, Hope From Lin Manuel Miranda
This Week: Hard to imagine there are arts headlines to compete with election news, but here goes: Science tries to explain why we’re ideologically segregated… It’s not just politics – arts and entertainment don’t really know what their audiences want… Even the most-respected arts coverage is being cut back… Infighting on the jury of the National Book Awards point to how deeply we’re divided… To end on an upbeat note, read Lin Manuel Miranda on the power of arts education.
Post-Trump Election, Our TV Political Dramas Are Looking A Bit Haggard
“The powerful women in or near the Oval Office on Scandal, Veep, Madam Secretary and House of Cards, who until Nov. 8 seemed to reflect or be just a step ahead of the news, now seem like an increasingly distant dream. And on shows like Designated Survivor and Graves, about a current and former president, respectively, outlandish plots about ethnic bias and immigration pop out and appear more believable.”
Charge: The National Ballet Of Canada’s New Ad Campaign Promotes Unhealthy Body Images
“The campaign, which officially launched Thursday, shows dancers from the National Ballet of Canada in photos and online videos dancing and posing in subway stations, on streetcars and in buses. But Jill Andrew, co-founder of the Body Confidence Canada Awards, worries the images send the wrong messages about what healthy, confident humans should look like.”