“We are essentially pattern-recognizing machines. Every great musician knows that a great performance involves building up tension to an eventual release. And that’s because that taps into our pattern recognition apparatus in the brain. Our brain is trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.” – PBS News Hour
Author: Douglas McLennan
What The Fight Over A Rural Library Says About America
“I didn’t realize it at first, but the fight over the library was rolled up into a bigger one about the library building, and an even bigger fight than that, about the county government, what it should pay for, and how and whether people should be taxed at all. The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here. The answer was, for the most part, not very much.” – The New York Times
Silicon Valley’s Miracle Tech Was Supposed To Make The World A Better Place. What Happened?
These magical machines were supposed to provide a solution to the economic and political problems of the late twentieth century, a way to transcend and break free of the confining aspects of postwar capitalism. This was a feint, a way of imagining a miracle fix to tensions and conflicts that had no easy resolution. Computers, Margaret O’Mara suggests, have long been metaphors as much as machines. – The New Republic
Does George W. Bush’s Art Deserve A Show At The Kennedy Center?
“By giving these paintings the endorsement of a professional exhibition, in the nation’s capital, with the imprimatur of a major arts center and by extension the federal government (which supports the center’s budget), the art has been put into a different context, where it does not belong.” – Washington Post
American Research Universities Association Decides To Expel Canadian Universities… Then Backtracks
Whatever the reasons for its decision, AAU received significant blowback not only from the Canadian institutions but from some of its U.S. members, who argued that it seemed tone-deaf for an association whose core enterprise — scientific research and education — is an increasingly global one. The seeming parallel to the inward-lookingness of the Trump administration didn’t help. – Inside Higher Ed
Pop-Up Pop Culture Experiences Are Everywhere. Bored Yet?
The gold standard and the pop-up worth getting on line early to score tickets for is probably “Saved by the Max.” After its launch last year, Eater Los Angeles described it as a “near-complete recreation of the ’90s Saturday morning staple Saved by the Bell‘s diner.” It feels like it has items from every episode and Easter eggs to inside jokes for both die-hard and casual fans lurking in there somewhere. A $40 ticket gave Chicago and West Hollywood fans an appetizer, an entree, and all the fandom they could handle. – Fast Company
Walt Whitman Had Troubling Views. So Why Is He Still Venerated?
“The question goes beyond whether or not Whitman should be banished from the literary forum, if such a thing were even possible. If America can be said to have a national poet, if “O Captain! My Captain!” is still memorized by schoolchildren, then the fact of Whitman is burned into America’s signature.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Why Civility Is So Difficult In A Democracy
“To regard one’s opposition as being on the wrong side of an important political dispute is to regard them as being on the side of injustice. Thus, heated tones, raised voices, and spicy language – not to mention a measure of frustration, impatience, and resentment – are precisely what should be expected in many democratic disagreements.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Our Most Favorite Story Lines? The Sympathetic Protagonist
Orphaned protagonists are so common that an online encyclopaedia of narrative tropes has more than 25 pages on orphan-related themes, including ‘Street Urchin’ (Oliver Twist), ‘Disappeared Dad’ (Forrest Gump) and ‘Doorstop Baby’ (Harry Potter). – Aeon
How Nietzche’s Ideas Still Permeate Our Thinking
The adventures of “super” and “über” are a case study in the inescapability of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which has affected everyday discourse and modern political reality like no body of thought before it. – The New Yorker