Category: ideas

The Powerful Role Of Gossip In Ancient Greece

While Aristotle suggests that gossiping was frequently a trivial, enjoyable pastime, he also makes clear that gossiping could have malicious intent when spoken by someone who has been wronged. This evaluation of words as weapons in the hands of the wronged is particularly pertinent when thinking about how the Athenians made use of gossip in the law courts in Athens, because Ancient court cases were based heavily on character evaluation of those involved in the case rather than on hard evidence. – Aeon

Are We In A Post-Truth Era? That’s An Absurd And Ahistorical Suggestion

The history of ideas, in fact, suggests the opposite… The assumption that the last 50 years or so have marked some unprecedented break with a previous age of truth reflects both an inattention to history and an attitude that might be labeled “pessimistic narcissism,” since it yet again focuses attention on the generation that came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. — The Nation

So The Artist Has Misbehaved. Do S/He And The Work Now Have To Disappear?

Lionel Shriver: “For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-­bound to demolish the best about them as well.” – Harper’s

An Argument: Why Cultural Appropriation Is A Good Idea

Graham Daseler: “The good news is that cultural appropriation is here to stay, no matter how many angry Twitter mobs come to kill it. Critics of the practice can’t even state their grievances without stealing the artifacts of at least half a dozen cultures. The expression itself is a prime example. The word “culture” comes to us by way of French, while “appropriate,” meaning “to take,” was plundered from Latin by Middle English. This, if nothing else, demonstrates how futile it is to try to stop the tsunami of culture or to build fences around it. There is nothing more human—or, one might equally argue, humane—than the desire to copy, emulate, and learn from people who are different from ourselves. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” – The American Conservative

Provocation: Was Modernism Intended To Exclude The Masses?

“If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader did not understand it.” – JSTOR Daily

Elon Musk Proposes Bach To Protect Cars

To prevent vandalism of his expensive cars, Musk announced plans for new theft prevention. “The latest details of the car monitoring system — that sound like a joke, but knowing Musk are possibly real(??) — were introduced on his Twitter page Saturday night. Musk claims the watchful cameras will play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue composition. He also said thieves might hear the metal versions of the classical piece.” – Mashable

The Religion Of Economics Is Done

Fareed Zakaria: “Let me be clear: Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world. But in the heady days of post-Cold War globalization, when the world seemed to be dominated by markets and trade and wealth creation, it became the dominant discipline, the key to understanding modern life. That economics has since slipped from that pedestal is simply a testament to the fact that the world is messy.” – Foreign Policy