Category: issues

Retha Powers, editor of the newly-published first edition, says that people ask her, “Why have this book if we have a President who is black? Is it really necessary for us to do this?” She says that the reason is to add stories to our collective memory: “The lens through which we look at history, when it’s narrow, tells us a very, very narrow story, a narrow impression of what the truth is.”

“Do artists have a special responsibility to speak out about injustice? Or do artists contribute best to social welfare by the practice of their art, and that alone? This issue is pertinent in classical music, because the field is considered, for better or worse, a high art with a mystique of gravitas and enlightenment.”

Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, argues that the Middle East in particular – especially Syria – needs the help of those heroic men and women to save the region’s irreplaceable cultural heritage.

“Humanists have paid a heavy price for their shrinking act. We are more or less ignored now by both the general public and our colleagues in the natural sciences, whose disciplines, of course, make no sense at all outside of universal observations, and who often work from bold cosmic visions, wildly counterintuitive models (think ghostlike multiverses and teleporting particles), and evolutionary spans of time that make our “histories” look insignificant and boring by comparison.”

“Twitter may be the most powerful amplifier for individual voices that history has ever seen. Messages that resonate accrue retweets and co-signatories, a shout builds into a roar, and a roar into a revolution. … And as a mechanism for generating a groundswell of opinion, it’s as dangerous as it is potent.”

“The land of fake Rolex watches, knockoff DVDs and counterfeit Viagra is now discovering copyright, and it is coming as a bit of a shock for many Thais.”

“The federal agency reports that, in 2013, 2.1 million workers had, as their primary occupation, a job that fell into the “artist” category (including musician, writer, and designer). Another 271,000 or so reported their second job—the one where they put in fewer hours than their main job—fit that description.”

“The thing is, the very idea of knowing the truth is now elastic. While we think that the digital age has moved us forward in terms of communication, it has, in fact, driven us back to something closer to medieval culture.”

“Can culture can reach those parts that diplomacy cannot? Can it improve relations between nations? And what are the consequences of asking it to?”

“They’ve deployed alongside men as soldiers in three wars, and since the 1990s, a significant number of them are training, fighting and returning from combat. But stories about female veterans are nearly absent from our culture. It’s not that their stories are poorly told. It’s that their stories are simply not told in our literature, film and popular culture.”