I have tried not to think too often about the long shadow that Paul Bowles casts over Tangier, but this year’s commemorations have made it hard to avoid: the twentieth anniversary of Bowles’s death and the seventieth of The Sheltering Sky’s publication. In Tangier, celebrations to mark this “existential masterpiece” are under way, including balls and masquerade parties. And so I’ve found myself again asking how this genteel American writer came to be so bound up with Morocco, and how, in recent years, he has become a figure of both nostalgia and contention. – New York Review of Books
Blog
The New Yorker’s List Of Top Cultural Moments Of The 2010s
From Zadie Smith to Christian Marclay’s clock to Beyonce and Clive James – the decade was a series of flashes. The New Yorker
US Justice Department Dings Live Nation For Consent Decree Violations
The DOJ investigation found that Live Nation had repeatedly violated the 10-year consent decree signed after the merger, in which the company agreed to refrain from monopolistic practices such as withholding valuable shows from venues in order to force them to contract Ticketmaster for ticketing services. – Pitchfork
How Elite Professions Feed Inequality
“My explanation is that interest groups that are involved primarily in providing professional services like finance or law or medicine have distorted or corrupted markets. The result is that the members of these groups can charge excessive prices for their services. That’s the main factor driving such high levels of inequality in the United States.” – CityLab
Stalker
Do all uncooked foods talk back? Snap crackle crunch; that’s how cerealized infants learn words for eating. Yet the sound of celery is curbed by wilt. And then comes heat, and silence. – Jeff Weinstein
It’s That Time of Year …
… when it seems that everybody is looking back over their shoulder more with nostalgia than disgust. I am not immune. Scrolling through some old emails, I came across this one called “from NELSON ALGREN’S LETTERS TO RAJAH.” – Jan Herman
Five Historians Claim Errors In The NYTimes’ Groundbreaking “1619” Project. The Times Responds
Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it. – New York Times Magazine
The Benefits Of Modesty
“If modesty sucks so bad, then why did I spend so much of my time thinking about it? Because, despite all the unsavoury accumulated baggage that modesty has acquired over the years, I think there is something there that is not only one of the important goods in life but is actually quite life-affirming. Seeing this means taking a short detour through some recent thinking on what modesty is, and what might be good about it.” – Aeon
A Tale Of Two Deaths Of Two Critics
While Clive James, a critic, writer and television broadcaster who left his native Australia to find fame in the U.K., received encomiums for the catholicity of his taste, the splendor of his wit and his evangelical passion for the life of the mind, John Simon, the Yugoslavian-born polymath who was long enthroned at New York Magazine as a theater and film critic, was remembered less for his razor-sharp prose than for his vitriolic glee, his attacks on actors’ physical flaws, his sometimes shocking political insensitivity and his penchant for acidulous put-downs and puns. – Los Angeles Times
Why High Resolution Audio Has Had Such A Hard Time Finding Takers
Leaving people’s personal abilities to distinguish high sonic quality from low sonic quality out of this conversation, there is a virtually insurmountable issue with mass adoption of hi-res audio: acoustic environment. – Shelly Palmer