“We should stop assuming that making choices amounts to freedom itself, or that making them rationally is the whole job of human reason. Freedom of choice, like free markets and contested elections, is valuable only when situated within wider horizons of value. Divorced from them, it becomes first absolute and then disastrous.”
Blog
The Real Appeal Of All Those Online Personality Tests That People Keep Clicking On
“As BuzzFeed‘s quizzes really started gaining steam a few years ago, a deluge of think-pieces attempted to make sense of why people just can’t get enough of them, even when they clearly have little to do with reality. Reasons included narcissism, existential searching, and boredom. … These probably are all true, to some extent. But they overlook something deeper about the nature of personality itself.”
New York Magazine Hires Sara Holdren As Lead Theatre Critic
Writes editor Adam Moss: “Sara never imagined herself a critic, but she has the makings of a great one. She comes at theatre criticism from an unusual background and perspective, which will be helpful, but she also happens to be a wonderful critical writer—vivid, wry, interesting, impassioned. We’re excited to welcome her to the dialogue.”
‘Meatballs’ – An Oral History Of The Movie That Changed Both Comedy And Summer Camp
“We sat down with several members of the Meatballs cast and crew” – including director Ivan Reitman and producer Dan Goldberg – “to talk about their experiences, both in front of and behind the camera, making the movie that still gives us goosebumps whenever we hear that child choir sing, ‘Are you ready for the summer?'”
John Adams Talks About Being A Distinguished American Composer
“One thing that disturbs me is that the friends I have dinner with — people who bear the same intellectual, social and political interests as I — don’t listen to my music. Very few of them even listen to Beethoven. They listen to — I don’t know — James Taylor or the Gipsy Kings. I realize I travel in a small cultural arena.”
Hell’s Mapmakers: Charting Dante’s Inferno, Circle By Circle
“In addition to being among the greatest Italian literary works, Divine Comedy also heralded a craze for ‘infernal cartography,’ or mapping the Hell that Dante had created. … There are several theories for why it was so important then to delineate Dante’s Hell, including the general popularity of cartography at the time and the Renaissance obsession with proportions and measurements. However, given the inherent limitations of mapping a fictional world, there was some debate between scholars over the specifics.”
Four Ways Theatre Critics Could Be Less Racist
Diep Tran: “We theatre journalists are a marginalized minority ourselves: overworked, underpaid, and constantly fighting to justify our existence. We’re not all that different from the artists we claim to love. And if we really love theatre, then we need to find a better way to talk about the diverse people who make it. Because right now, we—whose job it is to tell the truth—are failing at it.”
How To Fix The Met Museum? Benjamin Millepied, Nico Muhly, And Cheech Marin (Among Other) Weigh In
“A range of Met-ophiles – artists and archaeologists, chefs and curators, designers and D.J.s, playwrights and performers – offer their own ideas and expectations for how a new director can rethink the world’s greatest museum for a new century. Some of these suggestions are bold, others more whimsical, but all of them come from people who want nothing more than to see the museum on solid ground.”
The Death Of The Print Encyclopedia (And The Life And Death Of Encarta)
“We take Wikipedia for granted these days, but the encyclopedia on disc was a big deal – especially because it was both cheaper and smaller than the alternative. Today’s Tedium dives into the history of the electronic encyclopedia. Eat your heart out, Encarta.”
Blouin Artinfo Laid Off Staff, Outsourced Editorial To India And Used Fake Bylines: Report
In late May, all the editorial staff of Artinfo and Louise Blouin’s other art puiblications (Modern Painters, Art + Auction) were given two weeks’ notice and told they could reapply as freelancers. Then, reports Page Six, “owner Louise Blouin outsourced the editorial to India. But to make it seem as if there were still a cosmopolitan staff, articles were given bylines with hilariously generic international names.”