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Yowzuh! Whatta Wintah!

It’s been a crappy winter for New York’s intellectual class. “If ever there was a moment of generational split, this winter of our discontent is it. One need only consider the contrast: The struggling freelancers for a now-defunct journal of ideas are handed court papers, while the professional intellectuals, the ones with coveted staff jobs and 401(k)’s, are using prime literary real estate to lament their middle-aged romantic failures. The old guard is unraveling, the new guard is being sued.”

The Year Of The George

There are celebrations all over America this year in honor of George Balanchine’s 100th birthday. “All this is for the man who transformed ballet as surely as Pablo Picasso did painting or Balanchine’s collaborator, Igor Stravinsky, did music. Balanchine made an Old World art form new by dropping the frills and pantomime. He was about pure dance. Ballet did not have to tell a story: “When you have a garden of pretty flowers, you don’t demand of them, ‘What do you mean?’ ” he said.”

Orchestras As Fun Machines

A number of symphony orchestras are experimenting with their concert formulas to “lighten up” and “have more fun.” Tim Smith isn’t much impressed: “While I applaud the determination of orchestras to fight for their lives, I’m not convinced that any amount of bells and whistles attached to such a tradition-crusted activity as a symphonic concert can bring to the box office previously uninterested listeners. And if you did manage to reel someone into the concert hall because of assorted “enhancements,” aren’t you setting yourself up for greater expectations – not for the actual music, but for more enhancements?”

On The Moral Justification For Attacking Art

Roger Kimball sympathizes with the Israeli ambassador to Sweden who attacked a piece of art in Stockholm last weekend. But was he justified in attacking it? “I think not. His outrage at “Snow White” was understandable, even exemplary, but he should not have destroyed or defaced the exhibition. There were many steps open to him short of violence. To vandalize an art work–even a bad art work, even a morally reprehensible art work–is to adopt the tactics of the enemies of culture.”

Hare: Newspaper Critics’ Stars Is A Militantly Philistine Policy

Playwright David Hare rails against The Guardian’s practice of assigning stars to reviews. “Apart from anything else, why does a self-respecting critic agree to a system of grading that renders his or her detailed reaction superfluous? ‘What did the Guardian think of it ?’ ‘Oh, they gave it two stars.’ Why would any critic let their presumably thoughtful work be so diminished?”

Losing American Creativity

America is losing its creative and economic edge. “Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They’re doing it through a variety of means – from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they’re luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States’ province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas.”

Is College Becoming Devalued?

Will more college education for more people make Britain more meritocratic and shrivel the class system? Nope. “Employers are becoming less interested in educational qualifications. That’s happening for two reasons. Part of the job of higher education is to send a signal to employers—that someone has learnt to think, to persevere, to absorb information and to present ideas. As the supply of graduates grows, and the quality of teaching in Britain’s shabby, crowded universities declines, this signal is fading. At the same time, services have been growing at the expense of manufacturing, and, increasingly, the qualities that employers in the service sector want are those the middle classes acquire at home: articulacy, confidence and smartness.”

Time To Tone Up That Mental Muscle

“You say the brain isn’t really a muscle? Irrelevant. Recent studies indicate that it can bulk up: The hippocampus, a brain region responsible for thought and memory, produces new cells throughout a person’s life, and some neuroscientists believe other parts of the brain also regenerate. The trick to keeping those new neurons? Use ’em or lose ’em…”

Satellite Radio Threatens The Traditional Variety

“Satellite radio has finally evolved from an expensive fantasy into another booming category of entertainment for the digital decade, alongside DVD and MP3 players. Traditional radio broadcasters, which lobbied the FCC against issuing licenses to the companies in the ’90s, are growing increasingly alarmed by their popularity and plans for expansion.”