“The common forebear of both “relevant” and “relieve” is the French relever, which meant, originally, to put back into an upright position, to raise again, a word that twisted through time, scattering meanings that our two modern words have apportioned between them: to ease pain or discomfort, to make stand out, to render prominent or distinct, to rise up or rebel, to rebuild, to reinvigorate, to make higher, to set free.” – Harper’s
Author: Douglas McLennan
Composer Osvaldo Golijov Was A Rising Star. Then Ten Years Of Silence
“I was really depressed,” Mr. Golijov, 59, said by phone recently, of his creative drought. “That is the shortest answer.” – The New York Times
Architecture Critic Wins Pennsylvania State Senate Seat
Nikil Saval — a Bernie Sanders–endorsed democratic socialist, former editor of the literary magazine n+1, New York Times contributor, author of Cubed: Secret History of the Workplace, and community organizer — is replacing Larry Farnese Jr. a Democrat who has been state senator since 2009. He is also the first Asian American to be elected to Pennsylvania’s senate. – Curbed
Why Anxiety Is Essential To Our Wellbeing
“The most fundamental enquiry of all is into our selves; anxiety is the key to this sacred inner chamber, revealing which existential problematic – the ultimate concerns of death, meaning, isolation, freedom – we are most eager to resolve.” – Psyche
How To Tell When Societies Are On The Verge Of Collapse
“Just as apocalyptic dystopias, with or without zombies, have become common fare on Netflix and in highbrow literature alike, societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.” – The New York Times
A Radical Rethink Of San Francisco State University’s Music Program
With the clarion call of the Black Lives Matter movement ringing in the background, Modirzadeh described the SFSU music program as fettered by “a deep intergenerational upholding of that archaic ‘separate but equal’ logic that miseducates, leaving our students perpetually revolving around a musical caste system stuck thick in ethnic myopia.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Construction Of Ancient Mega-Stone Henge Might Have Been Resistance To Progress
“You could look at it as the last hurrah of the stone age. They could see the changes coming and decide to resist them – they may have been thinking: ‘We don’t need these changes. We’ll build bigger and better monuments to our gods. We’ll knuckle down and stick with what we know’.” – The Guardian
How To Stay Creative During COVID Lockdown
The sameness and lack of novelty in our Covid existence can negatively impact our creativity — our ability to put ideas together in new, useful combinations to solve problems. Creativity is often enhanced when we’re exposed to new situations. – Harvard Business Review
What Exactly Is “Theory” In The Humanities (And Why Should We Care?)
The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. – The Millions
A Conversation On Editing-Driven Writing
“Commentary Magazine has, from the beginning, been an editor’s magazine. Very few pieces that Elliot Cohen edited, or that I edited, or that Neal edited, were not worked over, sometimes radically worked over. There are arguments about whether this is a good way or a bad way, but that’s the way it was at COMMENTARY. I don’t think any other magazine, except possibly the New Yorker, is as heavily edited as Commentary has always been.” – Commentary