Category: ideas

“New books, movies, and plays keep spilling out of the perennial wellspring of Oz. Each reveals a facet of that fabled land – and of the generation that produces the work.”

“He was a philosopher who helped shape the destiny of nations, which is more than can be said for Pythagoras or AC Grayling. He was also a political visionary of stunning originality … Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker’s creation. It is in Rousseau’s writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism.”

He was “the one and only Enlightenment thinker who ferociously attacked the very value of art (and science as well) … [His] fundamental idea [was] that art, instead of ennobling us, and offering paths to better and more meaningful lives, mostly makes for miserable modern creatures instead of free and happy ones.” Yet artist and academic Laurie Fendrich finds that “Rousseau’s brilliant railings … offer a road back to discovering the awe lurking in art.”

Gary Gutting: “Amid the frequent confusion, frustration and anger of our political disagreements, patriotism – a deep-seated love of our country – remains something that has the potential to bring us together, particularly at times of national crisis or triumph. But within my own particular intellectual tribe of philosophers, patriotism is often regarded as a ‘problem,’ an emotion that many find hard to defend as morally appropriate.”

“Much as video killed the radio star, the internet has killed the porn star. … This is both true and not true: the internet did kill porn. But the internet is also for porn. Fortunately, this is not some sort of Schrodinger’s Porn in which the porn is neither alive nor dead until it is observed. Interestingly enough, this decline of the traditional porn industry does raise some ethical concerns.”

“For a century and a half, Mormonism has been something of a paradox in the history of the American West: passionately argued about by the church’s adherents and detractors, but largely ignored by professional scholars … [Now] a growing cadre of young scholars of Mormonism are enjoying their own turn in the sun, and not just on the nation’s op-ed pages.”

“Jean-Jacques was also, in his way, the philosophical progenitor of Facebook, of the notion that we should live our lives in the open, hiding nothing, for concealment is both the symptom and the cause of insincerity, which was one of J-J’s bugbears.”

“It isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve ‘encouraged’ their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.”

Michael Kaiser thinks that advocates for new models for the arts aren’t offering enough specifics. Adam Huttler gives it a whirl.