“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” – New York Review of Books
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How Merce Cunningham Made The Judson Dance Theater Revolution Possible
Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay tell Alastair Macaulay what they learned from Cunningham that enabled them to transform modern dance. – The New York Times
How Belief Turned Into Opinion
‘The Reformation and Counter-Reformation participated in parallel projects of religious discipline: while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants disciplined populations of unbelievers.’ Belief in the modern sense of the word was bred of the resulting strain. The demands imposed on Christians by inquisitors and Puritans alike proved too much for many of them. Dissidents emerged in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, who emphasised the subjectivity of religious conviction. Belief was to become opinion. – History Today
‘Dude’, ‘Grotesque’, And Other Words That Came From High-Culture History
Dude seems to have developed from a pejorative epithet for a man about as far as possible from Jeff Bridges’s character as one could get. Grotesque came from a hole in the ground in Rome. Picturesque originally referred to actual pictures — specifically, a particular style of painting. Silhouette started as Louis XV’s treasury secretary, became a snippy insult, and only then came to refer to framed side-views of a person, cut from black paper. – BBC
Train The Brain: How Neurofeedback Can Make Us Believe
“By linking brain activity to an image or sound in real time, we can use simple game-like techniques to get people to train themselves to forge new neural connections and voluntarily adopt (or avoid) certain mental states.” – Aeon
At The Beginning Of The 20th Century Pianist/Composer Cecile Chaminade Was A Star. Then She Was Forgotten
More than a century later, Chaminade and her music have been largely expunged from history, and the societies named for her have disappeared — all except one: the Chaminade Music Club of Yonkers. – New York Magazine
Diary Of A Player In The First US Orchestra Ever To Visit Mao’s China
As the Philadelphia Orchestra prepares to depart for its 12th tour to China, here are excerpts from a journal kept by the piccolo player on the orchestra’s first tour there, back in 1973. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
‘When Literature Is Broken, We Rebuild It — Because We Need Shelter’: Arundhati Roy’s PEN America Lecture
“So, as we lurch into the future … what is literature’s place? What counts as literature? Who decides? Obviously, there is no single, edifying answer to these questions. So, if you will forgive me, I’m going to talk about my own experience of being a writer during these times — of grappling with the question of how to be a writer during these times, in particular in a country like India, a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously.” – The Guardian
Howard Stern Explains How He Turned Into Terry Gross
Three years ago, the Times ran a feature about how the erstwhile King of All Media had moved on from the crazy, raunchy stuff that made him rich and famous and become an intelligent, sensitive, and generally admirable interviewer. Here, in an extended Q&A, he tells David Marchese just how it happened. (includes straight talk about Donald Trump, a longtime friend and frequent guest of yore) – The New York Times Magazine
Can A City’s Cultural Vibrancy Be Measured? Here’s An Economist Who’s Trying
“Provided that culture uniquely defines a city, which urban contexts are more culturally vibrant? And in which ones does culture drive creative economies? This study presents a novel and freely accessible dataset – the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor – gathering 29 indicators for 168 European cities. Capitals generally lead on ‘Creative Economy’ but non-capitals do better on ‘Cultural Vibrancy’.” – EconomistsTalkArt.org