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Why It’s Never Too Soon To Make Art About Tragedy

As we try to navigate through an age defined by particularly egregious bullshit, writers have a moral obligation to avoid infecting the universe with more careless storytelling. It’s a privileged viewpoint to declare that the only thing in the world that matters is my personal interpretation of events.

The Bizarre Russian Big Money Culture Machine

Those who are familiar with the state’s cultural agenda in Russia are no longer surprised by these kinds of events, but it’s still difficult to get used to. You’re a good artist if you earn a lot, and preferably, have a wide audience. For the BraVo prize, as written on the website, any artist could be nominated, so long as they had the potential to “reach an audience of three billion.” In a state where culture, whether serious or for entertainment, still belongs to the service sector at the legislative level, more is more.

How Communist Bulgaria Became A Hotbed Of Thinking (And Worrying) About Robots

Bulgarian engineers and cyberneticians, champions of this new technology, increasingly worried about what this meant. In the ivory towers of places such as the Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics in Sofia, they wrote detailed papers on robotic movement, image recognition, planning algorithms. They ran experiments and built labs to test how to perfect Man-Machine Interfaces – from the design of the perfect office that would minimise an office worker’s eye-strain to the future melding of human and machine vision.

It Used To Be Possible To Know Anything. Here’s The Last Man Who Pulled It Off

It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson’s dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.

Libraries Are Messy, Flawed Human Places

If Stuart Kells wants to show that libraries are human places, he has also chosen stories that reveal their venal side. His librarians can be thieves, hoarders, or shameful caretakers. Even when they love books, they can’t be trusted with them. In its ideal form, a library protects books, celebrates them, and also makes them available to a wide group of readers. In this history, any single library rarely achieves all of these goals at once.

Small Study Suggests Childhood Trauma May Lead To More Intense Creative Experiences

A study of 234 performing-arts professionals found those who experienced intense childhood trauma—about 18 percent of the participants—reported higher levels of anxiety and internalized shame. But “they were also more fantasy prone, a factor that may enhance creativity,” write Paula Thomson of California State University–Northridge and S.V. Jaque of York University.

This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists

Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, who chairs the jury, said the judges had chosen “an outstanding group of artists, all of whom are tackling the most pressing political and humanitarian issues of today”.

Athenian Symposia And Parisian Salons, Reinvented For Millennials

“On a mild spring evening, ten people gathered for dinner in a converted brewery in east London to speak of serious things. The event was hosted by Norn, a hospitality company that describes itself as an ‘offline social network’. Members can stay for a month or more in its houses in London, San Francisco, Berlin and Barcelona, and take part in salons and meals which come with conversation menus that prescribe high-minded topics for each course.”

You Can’t Do Philosophy Properly Without Considering Human Nature (This Should Be Obvious, But …)

“A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science. This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt.”