Category: issues

Richard Florida (in his urbanism-meets-Freakonomics mode): “Though metal may be the music of choice for some alienated working-class males, it … holds less sway in the ravaged postindustrial places of its birth, but remains insanely popular in Scandinavian countries known for their relative wealth, robust social safety nets, and incredibly high quality of life. ”

“The Pre-Raphaelites – that dreamy, incestuous, awkward group of Victorian artists, writers, and aesthetes – are back.” (Does this mean that Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience was the original Portlandia?)

Tony Abbott is trying to reassure Australian culture makers that he’s not anti-arts, despite having slashed $60 million in spending on the arts sector and pulling another $68 million away from the Australia Council for the Arts and Screen Australia.

“The decision to drop the works by the US authors was because of the Department for Education’s desire for the exam to be more ‘more focused on tradition’ and there were fewer opportunities to include them in the new syllabus.”

“As about 40 protesters spread through the multilevel museum, a voice boomed across the open rotunda: ‘No justice, no art.'”

“What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.”

“Amazon is holding books and authors hostage on two continents by delaying shipments and raising prices. The literary community is fearful and outraged — and practically begging for government intervention.”

“Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark.”

“The Bay Area has such a superiority complex that it’s been blinded to the reality of what Los Angeles is really about – and, lately, to just how far San Francisco has moved from its own professed values.”

“What intrigues me is that there are 31.1 million Americans between 18 and 24, and 21.8 million of you—70 percent—are going to college. It is not possible that 70 percent of you are among the 50 percent of you who are above-average in intelligence.”