“The first step is to start seeing our infrastructural networks not merely as single-use conduits of one kind or another — to carry cars, storm water or consumer goods — but as platforms for a new kind of urbanism, holding housing or making room for innovative ideas about energy or water.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Most Of The Traditional Measures Of TV Success Have Melted. But The Emmy Endures
“Over the last decade, television has both taken flight and blown itself up. In the new landscape, where the armies of cable networks, streaming platforms and video-on-demand services have trampled all the old mileposts, an Emmy is the last traditional, tangible mark of success.”
What In The World Has Happened To Chuck Close?
“After 30 years of splitting his time between the tony enclaves of Manhattan and Bridgehampton, he has recently set about leaving much of his old life behind: filing for divorce from his wife, Leslie, after 43 years of marriage, disappearing for the winter to live virtually alone in a new apartment on Miami Beach and retreating from his summer friends to the crowded isolation of Long Beach. Even when Close ventures into the city for a gallery opening these days, he will often turn up in some outlandish costume, in fabrics printed with giant starfish and sunflowers, with lipstick smeared across his face and billowing, extravagant scarves.”
The Critic As Crime Detective (Suspicion Abounds)
“What suspicion as an interpretive approach implies is that literary texts are always hiding something. The meaning of a work is buried, a brilliant jewel whose rays can only be glimpsed once the layers of obfuscating sediment have been flensed from the text. So, like a patient in analysis, whatever it seems on the surface to say, it must really mean something else. Under this cool, post-Freudian gaze the motives of authors, narrators and readers themselves are revealed as equally obscure and unreliable.”
No, It’s Not Your Imagination – Pop Music Is Getting More Narcissistic (We’ve Got The Data)
“Compared with earlier years, songs in 2010 were more likely to include the singer referring to the self by name, general self-promotion, and bragging about wealth, partner’s appearance, or sexual prowess,” the researchers report. “A similar, albeit nonsignificant increase, was also seen for bragging about musical prowess and demands for respect. Overall, the most popular music from 2010 contained more self-promotion than music from 1990 or 2000.”
A History Of Being Exhausted
“Those who imagine that life in the past was simpler, slower and better are wrong. The experience of exhaustion, and anxieties about exhaustion epidemics in the wider population, are not bound to a particular time and place. On the contrary: exhaustion and its effects have preoccupied thinkers since classical antiquity.”
When An Artist Burns His Work, It’s A Violent Act, Meaning What, Exactly?
“There are numerous examples of governments and institutions putting books into bonfires, but they are still actions of external protest and censure. When writers burn their own manuscripts, they are destroying their own words. Cathartic, but also a bit sadistic. Burning is a slow, ritualistic death. Why not simply throw away a manuscript?”
Pokemon Go! Changes The Way We Want To Interact With The World
“This weekend I went to the recently opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and wanted to know everything about the art and various installations, beyond what was posted on the walls. I felt as if I should be able to lift my phone and get more details on the process of the creation of the art work, rather than having to type a search term into my browser. Pokémon Go had changed my expectations on how to access information. That shift in expectation, perhaps, is the game’s true importance.”
Its Funding Ending, The World Monuments Fund Scales Back
“Since its founding, the fund has helped with many projects, including the repair of buildings damaged by flooding in Venice; the restoration of the Ochavo Chapel inside the 13th-century Toledo Cathedral in Spain; and a 10-year effort to restore the 18th-century Qianlong Garden within Beijing’s Forbidden City.”
How Pokemon Go Took Over The World In A Week (And What It Means)
“If Pokémon Go does represent a sea change in augmented reality, then it’s one that’s going to force us to rethink our approach to designed spaces, public and private. So many of the places people gather center on communal tragedy or reverence: funerals, war memorials, religion. What do you do when someone whips out their phone to catch a Geodude at the Holocaust Memorial? Or, as is apparently already happening, Auschwitz? Games, with the weight they bear—of play, of fun—might have once seemed inappropriate for those places. But now those places are squares on the game grid.”