Category: ideas

“Customizable Internet radio such as Yahoo’s Launchcast.com has been around for years, but Pandora is a twist on the concept: Instead of relying solely on computer software to spit out playlists, Pandora draws on its Music Genome Project, a 6-year-old effort by a group of musicians to identify the hundreds of traits and qualities that form the building blocks of music — and then to map out each individual song within this framework, or genome. Genre disappears, and every song is at once relatable, however closely or distantly, to every other.”

“When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats — the scans showed that ‘reward centers’ in volunteers’ brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.”

After 145 years, Western Union has stopped delivering telegrams. “The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn’t help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin.”

“On the one hand, Google is cool. On the other hand, Google has the potential to destroy the publishing industry, the newspaper business, high street retailing and our privacy. Not that it will necessarily do any of these things, but for the first time, considered soberly, these things are technologically possible.”

“What Good Are the Arts?” is an intensely argued polemic against the intellectually supercilious, the snooty rich and the worship of high culture as a secular religion for the spiritually refined and socially heartless. Modern art,” writes James Carey, “has become synonymous with money, fashion, celebrity and sensationalism, at any rate in the mind of the man on the Clapham omnibus.” Contemporary painting, opera, ballet, most poetry and theater are all removed from the life of ordinary people, being part of a cult available largely to the wealthy and mandarin, where only the elect may worship. Meanwhile, “mass art” — daytime drama, pop music, Hollywood filmmaking — is commonly dismissed as mere entertainment for shallow and stupid proles.

“Research has shown that some people, termed ‘amusic’, can neither produce nor perceive music. It isn’t a problem of the ears – they can understand other sounds perfectly well – but when it comes to music, all tunes sound the same. It’s no surprise, then, that music, which tends to move in small steps, is literally ‘lost’ on them. Though most amusia sufferers find listening to music pointless, some even find it annoying and unpleasant.”

Apple is teaming up with universities to offer college lectures for iPods. “Internet access to college lectures is nothing new, but listening to them on portable gadgets is a more recent phenomenon of the digital age, spurred in part by the popularity of podcasts, or downloadable audio files.”

Frank Gehry’s much-praised concert hall in Los Angeles is about to become the focal point of a promotional campaign for vodka, and it is hardly the first L.A. structure to have its facade hijacked for commercial purposes. Gehry insists that he’s vaguely flattered by the spirit company’s interest, but the architect’s aquiescence doesn’t really alter the larger question: “When a prominent work becomes a backdrop for blouses or set decoration for soda, does commerce dishonor art or can both come out ahead?”

Ever since Alexis de Toqueville’s famous American road trip, French writers have been obsessed with deciphering America. French author Bernard-Henri Lévy has spent much of the past couple of years traveling the U.S. in an effort to get a read on the world’s most powerful nation that would ring true to both Americans and Europeans. But one of America’s foremost cultural assessors, the author and radio host Garrison Keillor, has some serious bones to pick with Lévy’s methods, and with his conclusions. “You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there’s nobody here whom you recognize. [Eventually,] it dawns on you that this is a book about the French.”