Category: ideas

There are four problematic recent norms in academia: first, an academic career depends on personal and political matters; second, compliance is rewarded over scepticism; third, academic complaints are increasingly anti-intellectual; and fourth, logic and evidence are subordinated to feelings, even in the hardest of hard sciences. – The Critic

I think it can, and here’s a suggestion for how to do it: Schools could embrace an older style of teaching used by British universities — the tutorial system — and adapt it for the online world. – The New York Times

“What I think we can learn from that example is that anti-racism, or facing up to your past, is not a vaccine. It’s not a one-shot option. It’s a process that you need to continue to go through, and it will change generationally. People will see history differently. Generations will have different needs. I also want to emphasize that it’s not just revision of textbooks. I really think popular culture is at least as important as what gets taught in schools, perhaps more so.” – The New Yorker

Extraordinary times need astonishing remedies. In this very rich country, private wealth has soared to six times the value of annual GDP. So take a deep breath and jump in. A once-in-a-lifetime windfall tax of 10% on all wealth would yield £1 trillion – enough to pay for all the things we regard as essential for civilisation. – The Guardian

Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind. – Aeon

Of course, Zoom is not the answer to saving the arts for the digital generation, but it does pose the question: Why don’t we have better alternatives? For many institutions, fear that improving the virtual performance would threaten the health of the physical one has kept them in a state of pseudo-Internet denial. But the international health crisis has forced organizations to confront a generational sea change that has been brewing across the arts since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. – The American Scholar

When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of Michelangelo, God’s Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work. As dear friends died and his body weakened, he took on a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware, as William Wallace emphasizes, that he would never live to see them completed. In his deeply spiritual vision of the world, his own limits hardly mattered; God had called him, and he had answered. – New York Review of Books

Atlanta-based actor Stephanie Peyton: “We’re all stuck with this whole COVID thing. And so we have nothing better to do than to be on our social media and see these new videos every day of Black men being shot, and women disappearing and children not being found. Not only are we seeing this every day, but we’re experiencing it every day. And it’s not just with police but it’s with our bosses, it’s with our schools, it’s with our housing, it’s everywhere. And so for us, it was getting to a point of being like, we’re gonna call this stuff out.” – Token Theatre Friends

As Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series gets shot around the virus in five different countries (“Our main stages are in Europe, in countries that are super safe at the moment,” the executive producer says), it’s not bizarre that a series about an empire that almost falls thanks to the smarmy, hypnotic charisma of one intensely creepy man feels relevant. Genre, says the producer, is “an expression of revolutionary thought.” – Wired

A much-romanticised era for the city, these years are commonly celebrated as a period of explosive artistic, literary, intellectual and especially musical modernisation in which resolutely iconoclastic geniuses such as Schoenberg, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt and Alfred Schnitzler broke with the past in order to lay the groundwork for the future. In this narrative, Vienna’s musical revolution was especially radical: Schoenberg’s Pierrot was later characterised by Igor Stravinsky as ‘the solar-plexus of modern music’ – the culmination of a shift away from tonality and hundreds of years of classical music, in favour of a new music for a new century. But how did this happen? – Aeon