“The idea that being a decent person involves controlling the kinds of thoughts you allow yourself to think can easily be met with resistance. If virtue depends on limits to what is thinkable, and a certain free-thought ideal celebrates no limits, then the potential conflict between freethinking and virtue is obvious.” – Aeon
Blog
Transcending The Biological: Consider The Pointe Shoe
“Pointe shoes are a strangely enduring anachronism that epitomises the enduring desire for ballerinas to embody the unnatural, to portray an illusion. And their intention as a tool to evoke ethereal beings is in direct contrast with their actual biological impact on very real humans.” – Aeon
The Good Knife
I’d never had a knife in my life like the new nakiri. It was crackling sharp (though not for long), but something else made it exceptional: the calm ease with which the knife held my hand, as well as the uncanny confidence it gave me. Once the blade came within range of a leek or rolling radish, it knew what to do. – Jeff Weinstein
Musicals I … (fill in the blank)
Here is a real meme, plucked from the Web over the weekend, filled out, and posted solely for your amusement. – Terry Teachout
Recent Listening: Zeitlin Remembers Davis
Denny Zeitlin Solo Piano: Remembering Miles
– Doug Ramsey
New Financing, New Partners: Woodstock 50 Is On Again?
Perhaps. The music festival, planned to commemorate the iconic original fifty years ago, has been plagued by financing and organizational issues. But after a favorable court ruling and new partners, organizers say it’s on again. – New York Magazine
The Problem With Eternity (And What To Do About It)
“The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration.: – The New Yorker
Does A New Classical Music Streaming Service Solve The Meta-Data Problem?
Music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple have notoriously bad interfaces for classical music. The problem is meta-data, the absence of which makes it difficult to properly search. Now Idagio, “launched in the United States and Canada last fall, is a new streaming service focusing solely on classical recordings—but focusing on doing it right.” – Vogue
Colleagues Remember I.M. Pei
People in the field who were close to him, recalling him after his death, said that the warmth was innate and not for show. “You think of architects who seem to lead with their ego, and he was never like that,” said David Childs, a consulting design partner with SOM, a firm that often competed with Pei’s. “He was very generous to me when I was a 28-year-old kid.” – The New York Times
The Experts Problem: Why Generalists Out-perform Experts
It turns out that experts have bad track records at predicting what will happen. Generalists, on the other hand, who read widely and are constantly adapting to the observations they make, are considerably more savvy. – The Atlantic