Author: Douglas McLennan

Another Poetry-Isn’t-Dying Piece

The “death of poetry” has been predicted with such frequency that it’s become a mordant joke, as have the “Poetry is dead, long live poetry!” rejoinders; everywhere, though, are reminders that these debates can miss the broader point. Poetry can’t die, any more than air or water can meet such an end, because poetry in the more expansive sense is not “poetry” in the narrow. Poetry is permeative; it is currency; and it is, thankfully, too big to die.

Giant Public Art Piece Disappears From Prominent Chicago Building

So there it stood for the last decade: allegedly damaged, possibly devalued, definitely disowned, but still a boldly colorful presence on that busy corner and a landmark for the thousands of pedestrians who passed it daily. I wondered, the last time I saw it, why it was cordoned off with the familiar yellow construction-or-crime-scene tape; it didn’t occur to me that it might be coming down. Like the whitewashing of Bill Walker’s All of Mankind mural a few years ago, its disappearance is a reminder that the public doesn’t own or control the fate of some of the city’s most public art.

Philosophy And Art Can’t Answer The Big Questions. Only Science Can

Perhaps whole revised paradigms of thought, such as those a century or so ago when relativity and quantum mechanics emerged, will take comprehension in currently unimaginable directions. Maybe we shall find that the cosmos is just mathematics rendered substantial. Maybe our comprehension of consciousness will have to be left to the artificial device that we thought was merely a machine for simulating it. Maybe, indeed, circularity again, only the artificial consciousness we shall have built will have the capacity to understand the emergence of something from nothing. I consider that there is nothing that the scientific method cannot elucidate.

A Neuroscientist Finds She Has Been Reading Differently? Why? She Investigates

The reason no one’s reading War and Peace is, Clay Shirky asserted, because it’s “too long, and not so interesting.” Instead of mourning the loss of the “cathedral” reading experience offered by a great 19th-century novel, we should be adapting to the “bazaar” culture of the internet. If the medium trains our supremely adaptable brains to work differently, well, maybe that’s because they need to work that way to take advantage of “the net’s native forms.”

Theatre Study In Danger Of Disappearing From UK Schools

According to a survey of 420 members of the Association of School and College Leaders, 28% said they had cut back lesson time, staff or facilities for drama in the past two years. Drama has already weathered substantial decline over recent years, with entry figures tumbling year-on-year. The ASCL’s research comes as this year’s A-level results are announced in England. Final figures show that entries for drama fell by a further 6% on last year, to a total of 11,239 students.

Why The Bass Makes Us Want To Dance, Say Neuroscientists

In the current study they found that bass-heavy music was more successful at locking the brain into the rhythm. The lower frequencies, it seems, strong-arm the brain into synchronizing. This helps explain why a bass-heavy sound might make people more inclined to move along: the lower frequencies, as the authors write, boost “selective neural locking to the beat.”

Visits To London Museums Down Last Year

Visits to museums and art galleries fell for the second year in a row, dropping by 1% both last year and in 2016. Visit England said that “this was largely driven by those based in London, who saw a 4% drop in visitor numbers in 2017″. The number of overseas tourists visiting museums and art galleries (which Visit England says is “by far the largest attraction type for overseas visitors”) also fell significantly last year, dropping by 11%.

Be Authentic! Everyone Cries. Well, That Takes A Bit Of Work, Actually

Do people judge themselves to be more or less authentic over time? My inclination is that people believe they are becoming more of their true self as time passes. After all, most of us would like to think that we are growing and changing in positive ways. And the constant bombardment of messages to be ‘true to ourselves’ can suggest that some force prevents us from fully expressing who we really are.

His Book Is A Hit. Movie Producers Want It. But He Just Ran Out Of Phone Minutes In Prison…

The book was just published by Knopf, and is already a top seller on Amazon, and got the kind of author profile in last Sunday’s The New York Times that is usually jet fuel for a book to film deal. Trouble is, the author is in prison until 2020 for committing the bank robberies that are described in harrowing detail in the novel. And late this week, he ran out of phone minutes and will not be able to entertain any offers until he can again use the jailhouse phone on Sunday.