The rich have, Daniel Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
China Cracks Down On Social Media – And Artists Find Their Work-Arounds
Digital restrictions are the backdrop to the work of all Chinese artists, and for some, the so-called Great Firewall—the online surveillance structure that blocks data from foreign countries—provides both subject and medium. “The Chinese internet is such a unique and rich material, I am often inspired by it,” says the New York- and Shanghai-based artist Miao Ying. “For anyone who resides in China, you will be shaped by it, not just because of the firewall. China has its own internet environment and it is developing more rapidly than anywhere else.”
Scientific Publishing Is A HUGE Business (But Does It Harm Science?)
The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable.
A Convicted Murderer Making His Debut As Published Author
Curtis Dawkins began as writer, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree before he committed his crime. And while his book, “The Graybar Hotel,” has received early praise from writers like Roddy Doyle and Atticus Lish, its release has also raised uncomfortable questions for the publisher as it tries to win over booksellers and critics to rally behind a work by an unknown debut writer — who is also a convicted murderer.
When A Critic Reviews Dance Outside Of Her Own Culture (What Could Go Wrong?)
What deserves interrogation is not the question of whether or not to move beyond “tradition.” It is the rhetorical use of the term “tradition” and the presumption of an uninformed critic to police black choreographers’ prerogatives. When will we be done with these tired tropes of authenticity and “tradition” that continue to plague contemporary black performance?
Does Engaging In The Arts Even Matter?
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans generated much of their own art by themselves and at home, through playing parlor piano, reciting Shakespeare around the dinner table, and other exercises in Emersonian self-reliance. All that changed with the introduction of radio, sound recordings, movie theaters, and other forms of industrially produced mass entertainment. The audience’s role increasingly was reduced to coming to a large venue, sitting in a darkened room, then applauding on cue.
There’s A Revolution Happening In The Arts Right Now (And It’s Changing Everything)
“This new radical democratization threatens critics, just as it does well-paid artistic directors, executive directors, curators and all kinds of other gatekeeper types in the cultural universe, which explains why some say we/they react defensively to any grass-roots rebellion.”
How Teaching Machines To Play Chess Cracked The Code To Artificial Intelligence
“The history of computer chess is the history of artificial intelligence. After their disappointments in trying to reverse-engineer the brain, computer scientists narrowed their sights. Abandoning their pursuit of human-like intelligence, they began to concentrate on accomplishing sophisticated, but limited, analytical tasks by capitalizing on the inhuman speed of the modern computer’s calculations. This less ambitious but more pragmatic approach has paid off in areas ranging from medical diagnosis to self-driving cars. Computers are replicating the results of human thought without replicating thought itself.”
Is The Structure Of Today’s Arts Institutions The Problem With Today’s Arts?
“What is the real vision that we’re looking for in the performing arts? Maybe it needs to go beyond simply what goes on the stage. Maybe someone needs to bring vision to the fallacy, almost universally accepted, that the only way to sustain the arts we love is to shore up a system of oversized institutions that no longer seem to work well in today’s culture. Might there be a better way to reconceive orchestras and opera houses, and to allocate the considerable resources that go into the performing arts every year, while fostering creativity — rather than convincing everyone that art needs to be packaged in layers of institutional bubble wrap so it doesn’t get broken?”
Richard Florida’s “New” Urban Crisis
Florida’s new “crisis” is one of growing income inequality everywhere, segregation (by neighborhood, income, and race), and a disappearing middle class. It’s a crisis of suburbs, where poverty, income insecurity, and crime grow. It’s a crisis of the developing world, where urban hypergrowth and rapid industrialization fail to move people up the income scale.