“[The hypothesis] is unlikely to be true, … [and] since no one knows how to test it, the idea is perhaps not truly scientific at all. Those are valid criticisms, but the main reason we should hold out is that it is incoherent, both philosophically and logically. There could be no better contender for Wolfgang Pauli’s famous put-down: it is not even wrong. And yet, it attracts both publicity and extraordinarily confident endorsement.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Werner Herzog Motivational Posters
“Tired? Jaded? Lacking motivation and energy? Who better to provide you with a pep talk than cinema’s foremost exponent of positivity and general joie de vivre, Mr. Werner Herzog?!”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.17.15
Boldface names
(Greg Sandow on potential candidates for New York Phil music director)
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-02-17
Cubist Accumulation: How “Unrestricted” Are Leonard Lauder’s Metropolitan Museum Gifts?
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-02-17
Stevie Wonder on Duke Ellington
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2015-02-17
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“American Sniper” As American Rorschach Test
J. Hoberman: “While American Sniper has drawn a large and diverse audience there is no consensus as to what the movie means. Rush Limbaugh hailed it as’an extension of the November elections’ … Jane Fonda saw it as a movie about the psychic cost of war … The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has reported a spike in anti-Arab threats. A French journalist contacted me … to see if I thought the movie’s unexpected popularity was a response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.”
What Made Philip Levine’s Poetry Extraordinary
“Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine’s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. … Mr. Levine’s death is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn’t pull his poetry down into brackishness.”
“A 553-Year-Old Overnight Sensation”: How A Little-Known Florentine Painter Became An Art Star
“When American millionaires bought paintings by Piero di Cosimo in the late 19th century, almost all the works were attributed to other Italian Renaissance artists. Piero, a painter of Florence during its golden age, was simply regarded as too obscure to produce such masterful works.”
Alex Ross Meets The Wizards Of Acoustics
John and Helen Meyer can fix just about any acoustical problem in a space – from a dead auditorium to a restaurant full of deafening chatter. Their Constellation system “undertakes a process akin to the Photoshopping of an image, with undesirable elements removed.”
The Creative Class, “Culture Crash”, And Cinema
Richard Brody praises Scott Timberg’s recent book – and then argues that its points don’t quite apply to movies or narrative video and the people who make them.
Exploring The Metaphysics Of Love
“Is love an emotion? An experience? Is it a kind of desire? Is it possible to love a fictional person? To love more than one person? Is romantic love fundamentally different from other kinds of love?” A Vancouver philosopher is investigating these questions.
Where There’s A Backlash Against Valentine’s Day
“Valentine’s Day has taken off across Asia over the past few decades, embraced by the continent’s booming youth population as well as chocolate and gift-card companies. But the holiday, a relatively recent import from the West, often clashes with conservative cultural forces and, increasingly, anti-capitalist sentiments. Below, a look at how some in India, Japan, Thailand and Malaysia are pushing back.”