Category: ideas

Does this have implications for other systems that aren’t working well for the people who actually do the work? Perhaps. At the least, the industry “offers a very important lens to examine the choices that we make.” – The New Yorker

The director of the National Theatre and the Tate convened (by screen, natch) to figure it out. “At the beginning, it was shocking but people thought the crisis would last three weeks. Possibly six. Now we’re at a moment where we have to think about more than the recovery of individual institutions and our sectors. We’ve got to start thinking: how do we shape the world for the new normal? The pressures we’re under – financial, practical and emotional – mean we’ll not be the same on the other side.” – The Observer (UK)

Honestly, we don’t know yet – but we do know that every past crisis has changed our urban lives and architecture. Some changes may be good, but others? Horrible to contemplate. Still: “If there is going to be a rebound, it’s not going to be in the rural areas. It’s going to be in the cities.” – The Guardian (UK)

Unlike those who write dry, hyper-specialized academic criticism, Greil Marcus isn’t afraid, as one reader of his once put it, to let “everything remind him of everything else.” While discussing, say, a Bob Dylan B-side, he can suddenly juxtapose a line from one of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches with a particularly biting piece of dialogue from an obscure noir. This intuitive collage of different voices can offer the reader insights that aren’t available otherwise. – The Baffler

Following the Black Death in the 14th century, outbreaks recurred throughout Europe and the Mediterranean for centuries. The spectre of plague was significant not just in the history of medicine and society but of subjectivity – how we see ourselves and especially one another. Self-reliance became indistinguishable from self-protection. – New Statesman

The real question may not be “How can you possibly teach art online?” but “How can you possibly understand art online?” My simple answer to that complex question is: “At best, imperfectly. At worst, inadequately.” – Los Angeles Times

Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention — what Wolf calls “cognitive patience” — on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it. – National Affairs

Philosophers have long concerned themselves with what they call “the paradox of fiction”—why would we find imagined stories emotionally arousing at all? The answer is that most of our mind does not even realize that fiction is fiction, so we react to it almost as though it were real. – Nautilus

In the innovative system, the disinfectant is stored on the ground, and pumped through a hose to the hovering drone, which then spreads it throughout the theater. Meanwhile, another drone drifts underneath it to make sure that the hose does not get tangled in any of the seats. – Forbes

“The dual nature of power and truth results in the curious fact that we humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in much more nonsense. We are both the smartest and the most gullible inhabitants of planet Earth.” – The New York Times