Millennials aren’t looking for lifehacks to win friends and influence people; they are looking for workable systems that will sanction and codify their behaviors. Luckily for them, philosophers have been working on doing just that for the past several thousand years. – LitHub
Author: Douglas McLennan
Seattle Artists: Time To Move To Detroit
“Making art takes lots of time, and when time in a city becomes nothing but making that rent, you will not make art or the kind of art that requires (for its greatness) not just productivity but lots of time for leisure. This is the part of artistic production that’s almost always missed by those with practical minds, men and women with middle-class common sense, the judges of contests for art grants. A big part of making poems, paintings, novels, music, films, sculptures involves aristocratic waste or doing stuff unrelated to the direct or obvious act of creativity. Young artists of Seattle must stop smelling the coffee and do something about it. Move to Detroit.” – The Stranger
The Downsides Of Meritocracy
“Merit is a sham,” the preacher saith. “Merit itself is not a genuine excellence but rather—like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime—a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” – The New Yorker
What Amazon’s Big Emmy Wins Mean For The Future Of Streaming
With an avalanche of streaming platforms on their way to compete with Amazon as well as Netflix, what can Amazon’s very successful Emmys Sunday tell us about the future of the streaming wars? Mostly that the era of deep-pocket campaigning has only just begun. – Vanity Fair
How Economists Turned Everything In Our Culture Into Markets
Together, between the late 1960s and the 2008 financial crisis, they tore down the model of activist government intervention in the economy and replaced it with the simple idea that markets should be left on their own. In the process, they made economics the dominant explanatory framework of our time, commonly rolled out to account for matters from criminal sentencing to the dating “market.” – Washington Post
The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright?
Yes, Wright peacocked around Chicago, and later Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Scottsdale, Arizona, in dandyish bespoke clothes, leaving unpaid creditors in his wake. He busted up two families (one of them his own) by running off with a married client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. He had a bitter break from his mentor, Louis Sullivan, wheedled money out of friends and patrons, and told constant fabrications. But he also had a fundamental decency. – American Scholar
Why We Can’t Agree On What’s True Anymore
Public life has become like a play whose audience is unwilling to suspend disbelief. Any utterance by a public figure can be unpicked in search of its ulterior motive. As cynicism grows, even judges, the supposedly neutral upholders of the law, are publicly accused of personal bias. Once doubt descends on public life, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works. – The Guardian
Report: Cultural Districts Could Make More Impact
The report, commissioned by the Global Cultural Districts Network, urges cultural districts to plan, deliver and evaluate their social impact more effectively. It says there is “more that cultural districts can do to clarify where their social impact priorities lie and how they relate to their programme and other activities”. – Arts Professional
The Tools A Well-Educated Person Needs
For Aristotle, the virtues of character are not enough by themselves to work the magic of illumination that comes with exiting Plato’s cave. We also need the intellectual virtues: practical wisdom (phronêsis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia) – the latter being what philosophia is the love of. – Aeon
Met Opera Staffers Protest Placido Domingo’s Continuing Work With The Company
A number of longtime employees at the opera house have told NPR that they are furious that the New York company is continuing its association with Domingo. These staffers believe that their employer has a specific responsibility to take allegations of sexual misconduct seriously after the downfall of James Levine, the Met’s former music director of four decades, who has been publicly accused of sexual abuse by nine men. – NPR