Roger Scruton: “To my way of thinking, there cannot be a coherent conservatism, either in everyday life or in politics, that does not take high culture seriously. It really matters to the future of our societies that classical music should survive, not as a museum exhibit but as a live tradition of performance and enjoyment, radiating its grace and graciousness across our communities, and providing us all, whether as performers or as listeners, with a sense of the intrinsic value of being here, now, and among our fellows.” – Future Symphony
Author: Douglas McLennan
A Rising Chorus Urges Journalists To Get Off Social Media. Jeff Jarvis Dissents
“When journalists delete, dismiss, or disengage from Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Instagram or Reddit or blogs, they turn their backs on the people who finally — like the journalists — have a printing press to call their own. For too long — since Habermas’ alleged birth of the public sphere in the coffee houses and salons of London and Paris — that sphere has excluded too many people, whom social media finally can include. Listen to them.” – Medium
Question: A New Weekly AJ Highlights Newsletter?
I’d like to ask for your help. Our weekly ArtsJournal newsletter lists all the stories we collect each week on the website. It’s a long list – about 140 stories each week. We’re wondering if it’s a bit unwieldy? And we are wondering if we ought to begin offering a new weekly newsletter that boils it down a bit and offers highlights from the stories we’ve collected. That’s where we’re asking for your help. Could you take this short – promise, only four questions – survey to help us see if there’s interest in the idea? Thanks.
[Take the Survey]
– Doug McLennan, Editor
Buzzfeed Lays Off Entire National News Desk, National Security Unit
BuzzFeed’s national news and national security teams broke some major stories on the Trump administration, Russia’s use of social media to shift public opinions in the United States, and other important subjects. – Variety
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Glamorous Exile
Vain, Solzhenitsyn was less vain than most dissidents. He had no political deference, but a metaphysical humility had been beaten into him by what he had undergone. Exile was not a “new beginning” for him. He undertook it with dread, and a somewhat unrealistic idea of how tight a link he could maintain to the culture of the old country. – National Review
Have The Arts Become A Closed-Loop Self-Reinforcing Echo Chamber?
Simon Dancey: “The picture now is of a middle-class sector reinforcing its own values in an echo chamber that compounds the structural inequalities of the UK. This self-endorsing closed shop is never going to shift persisting inequalities and will continue to exclude a large section of our community, its values and potential. This is morally unacceptable, economically stupid and socially disgraceful.” — Arts Professional
Alan Walker’s New Chopin Bio – This Year’s Best New Book On Music?
Tim Page: “This is now the best biography of Chopin — meticulous, scholarly and well-told. Whatever the composer’s shortcomings as a person, his music grows only more moving. – Washington Post
Google Ethicist: Here’s How Technology Hijacks Your Mind
“Western Culture is built around ideals of individual choice and freedom. Millions of us fiercely defend our right to make “free” choices, while we ignore how those choices are manipulated upstream by menus we didn’t choose in the first place. This is exactly what magicians do. They give people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that they win, no matter what you choose. I can’t emphasize enough how deep this insight is.” – Medium
Unsealed Docs: Facebook Created Kids Game That Caused Them To Spend Millions
“Facebook created a system that allowed children to spend tens of millions of dollars through their parents’ credit cards and Paypal accounts on games and other goods without their parents’ knowledge and, despite concerns raised by game developers and solutions suggested by internal analysts, did nothing to fix the issue, according to a trove of documents unsealed from a 2012 class action lawsuit.” – Variety
There’s Considerable Evidence That Theatre Can Make An Impact In American Justice. Here’s How
“Given that 85 percent of U.S. counties are home to some number of incarcerated individuals, it’s likely that most of our nation’s theatres are close to at least one correctional facility. In those facilities about two thirds of the incarcerated are people of color. As theatres work to diversify their audiences along lines of income and ethnicity, a growing percentage of those attendees will have a personal connection to mass incarceration, opening up new opportunities for relevance to communities. In short there seems to be great room and reason to expand this field of work.” – American Theatre