“While universities continue to play an important role in intellectual culture, increasingly they are no longer the only game in town. With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities. Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making.”
Blog
Being Nice To The Big Bookers
Any theatre producer will tell you that the key to great sales is getting those people who book big groups to buy the tickets. Though The Lion King is a big world-wide hit, Australian producers are taking no chances as the show comes Down Under. Disney Australia chartered a plane and invited 216 big bookers from Victoria to come along. The hope is they’ll go back home and sell the show.
And The Scan Says: I Trust You
Scientists say they can use a brain scanner to tell whether one person trusts another person. “The results suggest that a brain region called the caudate nucleus lights up when it receives or computes data to make decisions based on trust.”
FCC Chairman To Cable Nets: Clean Up Programming
Kevin Martin, new chairman of the FCC, used the opportunity of his first major speech to tell cable TV execs to clean up their programming. “I think what you’re seeing is an environment in which consumers and parents are increasingly concerned. I think this is an opportunity for the cable industry to try to address it, not just speak to me but to speak to the consumers and parents.”
Remembering Saul Bellow
“The center of his fictional universe was Chicago, where he grew up and spent most of his life, and which he made into the first city of American letters. Many of his works are set there, and almost all of them have a Midwestern earthiness and brashness. Like their creator, Mr. Bellow’s heroes were all head and all body both. They tended to be dreamers, questers or bookish intellectuals, but they lived in a lovingly depicted world of cranks, con men, fast-talking salesmen and wheeler-dealers.”
Are Discs Dead?
“Over the past decade, consumers have purchased well over 10 billion CDs and DVDs. And if you believe the electronics makers, optical discs are now entering their golden age. In the coming months, you’re going to hear a lot about two new disc technologies, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, and the powerful coalitions that aim to bring them to market.” But guess what? Neither format is going to be a hit. Why? It’s all online, baby…
The Bocelli Phenomenon
“No one can deny that he’s successful: Bocelli has sold about 45 million recordings worldwide, and maintains a permanent address on Billboard magazine’s top-classical-artists chart. Like all big stars, he’s become an industry, slickly packaged and watched over by agents, recording executives and concert promoters. His image is carefully managed: Any journalist who would interview him is advised by his handlers not to ask about his blindness or his personal life. In other words, there will be no questions about the loss of his eyesight to glaucoma at the age of 12, or about his divorce in 2001 from his wife, Enrica.”
Video Finds The Book Biz
“With the advent of services like VidLit, which produces short, humorous, animated Flash films about books, authors have a new way to reach online readers. Because of the viral quality of online videos, some writers are finding success at the end of the broadband pipe…”
Christie’s Baroque
“The Pied Piper of the ongoing revival of Baroque operas, William Christie is not a man to be disobeyed. If we are now familiar with countless rarities by Handel, as well as long-forgotten gems by Monteverdi, Purcell and the French masters Lully, Charpentier and Rameau, it’s largely because of Mr. Christie’s passion for music written between, roughly, 1600 and 1750, and his ability to sniff out buried musical gold as unerringly as a pig finds truffles.”
Tapestries Solved In Billions Of Numbers
An attempt to clean and digitally photograph important tapestries from New York’s Cloisters becomes a puzzle only solved when sophisticated mathematicians crunch the billions of numbers stored in digital images. “Each pixel had to be calculated in its relationship to every other nearby pixel, a mathematical problem, known as an N-problem, big enough to practically choke [a supercomputer]. This was a math problem similar to the analysis of DNA or speech recognition…”