Category: ideas

“Sure, if you’re an artist trying to impress other artists, that high-profile prize can indeed be inspirational. But for those not eligible for a Pulitzer or Emmy—such as consumers who are invited to come up with new product ideas—money is the more effective motivator.”

“A futurist is a person who spends a serious amount of time—either paid or unpaid—forming theories about society’s future. And although it can be fun to mock them for their silly sounding and overtly religious predictions, we should take futurists seriously. Because at the heart of the futurism movement lies money, influence, political power, and access to the algorithms that increasingly rule our private, political, and professional lives.”

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted. All of the time.”

Part of the appeal of live art is the chance that it could go wrong. There is also a perverse pleasure in observing the authenticity of a mistake in a contrived setting — for instance, actors “corpsing” can prove exhilarating in small doses. The trend of confessional art (and one may extend the point to reality television) offers similar authenticity within an artificial environment, if not to the same extent as an onstage mistake. As playwright and actor Tim Crouch puts it, “To see someone fail and to be embarrassed is a very real thing, and we like it real and unmediated.”

Are the subjects of totalitarianism mindless drones? No, wrote the Polish poet who defected to France after working for a government in thrall to Stalin. Instead, people in totalitarian societies are practicing ketman. That talent, or ability to dissemble, “goes deeper than mere lying. Ketman reaches deeper into the soul than simple hypocrisy. Ketman deceives the deceiver, as much as the person being deceived.”

And, if so, what can writers do about it? “When our political leaders use language not as a torch to illuminate our challenges but as a prod to stoke our fears and hatreds, we all have a duty as citizens to combat such debasement of civil discourse by exposing the contradictions between those leaders’ grandiose promises and the likely consequences of their implementation. But writers have a second responsibility: to strip away the rhetoric that shrouds in palatable justifications the underlying prejudices to which such leaders appeal and reveal what citizens are actually embracing when they support such politicians.”

Adam Savage, who used to host Mythbusters, says he thinks so. “I’m not positive that literature could satisfy that deep need for the transcendent, but I hope it can, because for me it really has.”

Is there any such thing as world literature now? Can anyone who writes a book in English, which thoroughly dominates in the business and political worlds, really think of it as only a national book? (And other questions.)

“The fascist tradition of using the arts as vehicles for expanding the movement is visible in the U.S. today, in some cases in eerily similar ways to the original rise of European fascism in the early 20th century. In an interview with Pacific Standard, Ross discussed the ways fascists have historically snuck into mainstream cultural milieus, why progressives sometimes fall for fascist infiltrators, and how entertainment media played a role in the election of Trump.”