Category: issues

“Wikipedia has matured enough that you won’t find too many seriously wrong things in there. You still find incorrect things in textbooks, so … not much different.”

“Despite cutting staff and other expenses over the past three years, the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina has continued operating in the red … The losses occurred at the same time a more daunting problem – paying off long-term debt and funding repairs and improvements … – turned into what center president and CEO Kathleen Bateson has called a ‘$5 million nut to crack’.”

“These days, life online has become friendly, well mannered, oversweet. Everyone is on his or her very best behavior–and if they’re not, they tend to be quickly iced out of the conversation.”

“When respected journals–Nature for example–use terms such as ‘Prehistoric pin-up’ and ‘35,000-year-old sex object,’ and a German museum proclaims that a figurine is either an ‘earth mother or pin-up girl’ (as if no other roles for women could have existed in prehistory), they carry weight and authority. This allows journalists and researchers, evolutionary psychologists in particular, to legitimize and naturalize contemporary western values and behaviors by tracing them back to the ‘mist of prehistory.'”

“The disruptors who do speak out for Ferriss won’t be risking personal harm. They won’t be standing up against free speech. Ferriss approached Amazon for a book deal and in four days, it will be published. That’s not exactly censorship.”

“Like ‘feminist,’ ‘censorship’ has to be interpreted in context. Censorship really has two effects: symbolic and actual suppression of material. Since Beres’s print became a cause célèbre after it was censored, it is not being actually suppressed, only more widely circulated.”

“Speaking after an event that brought together the heads of 23 of England’s leading regional theatres, [the acclaimed director] told The Guardian that the lack of attention to the arts shown by the culture secretary, Maria Miller, was ‘outrageous … This is cultural life of our country. She is the minister of fucking culture. I mean, come on’.”

“As companies such as Google and Twitter complain that the patent system is horribly broken — bemoaning the quality of patents being issued, the “trolls” that do nothing but try and squeeze money from hardworking entrepreneurs, and the high cost of patent litigation — other big tech outfits such as Microsoft and IBM describe the landscape very differently. It isn’t hard to see why.”

“On Thursday evening, a group of artists will gather at Anish Kapoor’s studio in London to shoot a parody of Psy’s monster hit Gangnam Style, in support of Ai Weiwei. This follows Ai’s own version last month … It’s not the first time a huge pop hit has been reworked to make an artistic and political statement.” (They don’t all work equally well.)

“Of course, Canada has been responsible for supplying the U.S. with its leading men and oddball comedians for decades, but at the moment it seems like we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, in which Canada, long considered the U.S.’s boring, denim-wearing neighbor, has become America’s leading purveyor of cool.”