For Santiago Ramón y Cajal the brain was a beautiful, inconceivably complex, and self-regulating ecosystem, and he set out to write the field guide to its flora and fauna: “Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter, cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may someday—who knows?—clarify the secret of mental life.”
Blog
What Should Be Done With Statues Honoring Confederates?
“In the wake of the controversy over removing American monuments to the Cult of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Memento Park is not a bad model for us to consider following now — although certainly there are others. The dispute, which exploded into bloodshed, death and grinding national shame in recent days, demands hard thought. Decisions need to be made. Unlike sculpture, civic monuments are less the product of an individual artist than they are collaborations of entire societies. Civic monuments solicit a collective moral response. They invite an audience to affirm and applaud what it sees.”
What Should We Do With Books We Just Don’t Understand?
Could the book that initially seems plain wrong to us be precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people?
MoviePass Is Trying To Be The Netflix Of Movie Theatres. It’s A Daft Plan. (Or Is It?)
“AMC has come out guns blazing, even going so far as to include a solid alchemy burn in its press release trashing the company’s plan. As AMC points out, MoviePass — which buys tickets directly from the exhibitors, then redistributes them to its subscribers by way of a MoviePass-specific debit card — will lose money on every customer who sees more than one movie a month. So what’s MoviePass’s angle here? Is this a strange form of cinematic philanthropy? Or do they have a plan?”
Stephen Hough: Let’s Think About What Classical Music Does And How People Get It
I think the problem is that, since the Second World War, we have confused “daring” with “breaking rules for the sake of doing so.” Beethoven was a great rules-bender, rather than rule-breaker. Even his most outrageous pieces, like the late quartets, are still within classical forms. He doesn’t smash [the guidelines set down by his predecessors]. For me, that creates interesting tension.
Why Intellectual Critiques Of Populism Are Notoriously Unreliable
“Scholars have not always been the most objective students of populism, partly because their own interests are at stake, scholarship and expertise being so often numbered among the chief targets of populist abuse. Accordingly, scholars find populism to be too prone to ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and demagogy, and too vulnerable to capture by racial and ethnic and tribal bigotries, to serve as an authentic engine of positive social change.”
Study Says There’s More Swearing In Novels Now? So What Does That Actually Mean?
“On a broader level, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the art of a culture and the psychology of the society that produced it. Furthermore, noting word frequency in published writing does not have a one-to-one correspondence with spoken language in everyday life. Further furthermore, without any contextual information about how these words are used, we just have semantic fragments floating in history’s void, free of any of the things that turn them into actual language.”
A Piece Of Theatre That Tests The Will Of The Majority In Real Time
The Majority, a new show at London’s National Theatre by the performer and playwright Rob Drummond, is inspired by a wave of recent electoral upsets, from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 to the Brexit vote last year. Throughout the show, Drummond asks a series of timely questions to which the audience votes “yes” or “no” on in real time, with the results immediately revealed, as he demonstrates how easily the shape of a question can alter its answer.
The Beet Goes On: Vegetable Orchestra Takes Root On New York’s Long Island
Inspired by the venerable Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, Dale Stuckenbruck created the Long Island Vegetable Orchestra. They make snake gourds into saxophones, butternut squash into horns, broccoli into flutes, and long orange root vegetables into, yes, “carronets.” “Over the years, [the LIVO] has performed at schools, galleries, libraries and at an environmental conference in Geneva. It even appeared in a film.” (includes video)
Decay Of Our Culture Comes When We Decline To Celebrate Humanity’s Best Accomplishments
“We allow our great cultural institutions to fall into disrepair and disrepute because, as we strip them of their reverential traditions and their arduous canon, we also strip them of our reasons to cherish them. We call them before the tribunal of public opinion to justify their very existence, as if we can no longer see through the smog to the heights of Parnassus, lonelier than ever because we have forgotten that it is even there. We attempt to chain the Muses to the machinery of our modern malaise, as if we do not remember that they exist to show us the way to transcend that malaise, to find our way home again, by way of that steep and difficult climb, to the bosom of art and learning.”