Category: issues

“Very soon, the Police Department will finish a plan to cordon off the entire 16-acre World Trade Center site, adding lines of bollards and nine vehicle-screening zones that come with credential-presentation queues, guard booths and pairs of those bladelike barriers projecting out of the street.”

Our top two cities reflect the importance of this arbitrage opportunity. Both No. 1, Austin, Texas, and No. 2, New Orleans, are places where people can enjoy the cultural amenities and attitudes of “progressive” blue states but in a distinctly red-state environment of low costs, less regulation, and lower taxes.

That’s what the news media reported last Friday. “Though such a development would not be unwelcome, we [at Slate] had a sneaking suspicion while sorting through the coverage that this story might be a bit overblown.”

“We must radically alter this slightly too extravagant image of cultural policy, to awaken deep within all our regions an attachment to culture and the promotion of culture as a lever of economic attractiveness for our country,” she said.

“The modern antidrug campaign is not a democratic movement at all; the ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged … and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy.”

“Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is turning the Park Avenue tunnel in New York into a reverberating sound and light installation that celebrates free speech. … The NYPD asked the artist to install a time delay so messages could be regulated.” (He balked.)

“The smart phone-driven attention span of music audiences is increasingly fragile — and all this constant yammering is likely a ramification.”

“The film arrives in the moment after the predicted rage turned out to be something a lot stranger and more profound than flashes of fury.”

“A court in Saransk ruled that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova had not repented for her crime of hooliganism after singing a protest song against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral.”

“What was once a pointedly outsider and marginal activity — performance art, the creation of time-based work that defied definition and continuing exhibition — has become the everyday stuff of major museums.”