Category: issues

“What’s the real danger here? It’s that proportion is lost, that personal sensitivities undermine cultural continuity, that teachers shy away from difficulty and complexity, and that books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, even Huckleberry Finn, will be left out for fear someone is traumatized.”

“Human civilization, and the artistic activities associated with it, came about as a result of a measurable decline in testosterone levels that began accelerating around 80,000 years ago, according to a study published in the August issue of Current Anthropology.”

“Communications regulator Ofcom said UK adults spend an average of eight hours and 41 minutes a day on media devices, compared with the average night’s sleep of eight hours and 21 minutes.”

Joshua Rothman, responding to William Deresiewicz’s broadside against the Ivy League and its students: “I tend to draw the opposite conclusion from Deresiewicz’s data: the fact that you can feel soulless in such an intellectual paradise suggests that the problem is bigger than college. … Deresiewicz makes a mistake in ascribing to his students, as personal failings, the problems of the age in which they live.”

Wim Pjibes complains in an open letter that the city is “dirty, filthy, and too full”, with too many badly behaved visitors, hashish coffee shops, and whores in shop windows, not to mention a “medieval way of dealing with rubbish”. Opponents are not only calling Pijbes a killjoy, but suggesting that he’s in league with the forces “artwashing” the red-light districts for the sake of real estate interests.

“Exploring the message behind artistic works is a valid enterprise. Telling people not to help their children experience art is detrimental and irresponsible.”

“In our data- and metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun. Art itself, with its ardor, its emotionalism, and its unabashed assertion of the imagination, has become an outlier, its tendency to celebrate a purposeful purposelessness found to be intimidating, if not downright frightening.”

The nation “is deliberately staking its future prosperity on the export of its culture, its television, its music and the likes of Psy … Korea is throwing all of its weight and billions of dollars into making itself the number one exporter of pop culture in the world.”

“The US Court of Appeal described the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd’s efforts to charge licence fees to for which there is ‘no legal basis’ as ‘a disreputable business practice’.” Judge Richard Posner ordered the estate to reimburse plaintiff Leslie Klinger more than $30,000.

“The music that moved us in our youth stays with us for a lifetime. It imprints itself on our brains when our personalities are still forming. It mingles with our memory functions and defines our sense of pleasure. It restores a sense of wholeness to even the most fractured souls. But its effect may also account for something else – the fact that people tend to love throughout their lives the music (and movies and books and television) they loved as kids and teenagers. That’s another way of saying there might be a neurological reason baby boomers can be so boring when they insist their music was so much better than anything that came before or after. They can’t help it.”