Category: issues

“What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch.”

“It’s not about the bottom line, according to [director Dean] Sobel. It’s about value, and charging gives a museum an intrinsic worth. Nearly all museums charge, even though ticket revenue tends to be a small percentage of income.”

“Young people are massively connected with music. They not only want to use the music but they want to actually work in the music industry, many of them. Many of them want a future in the industry. Therefore the industry must have a future. That means public policy action, not just standing back and saying ‘we are too busy to do any of this; we’re just going to cut the deficit and let the free market rip content off from creators’. Every day they don’t act, money is haemorrhaging.”

“Winners write the history books – which is why the Afghan government’s recent decision to eliminate any post-1973 events from its school texts is so worrisome. Since none of the major groups can agree on a basic set of facts, the country’s new school books simply leave out the last four decades of events: no Soviet involvement, no brutal years of civil war, no rise of the Taliban, and no U.S. involvement.”

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“Muammar el-Qaddafi disavowed pre-1969 history as colonialist and un-Libyan. Now that he is gone, heritage-conscious Libyans have drafted a plan to preserve the ruins at Cyrene and promote them as a tourist attraction in a rural area where unemployment is high.”

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,”

Responding to discomfort that her widely-praised portrayal in The Help is of a maid: “That very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African-Americans have is absolutely destroying the black artist. The black artist cannot live in a revisionist place. The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy. People are messy. Caucasian actors know that.”

Documentary filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman (yes, he’s African-American) suggests that Black History Month is “a double-edged sword that ghettoizes black stories into the shortest month of the year and discourages further attention on them in the remaining months.”

“The Moth, a New York City-based group dedicated to the art of storytelling … [was] among the 15 organizations in 6 countries to receive the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Leadership … The money will be used to expand ‘The Moth Radio Hour’ from 10 episodes a year to a weekly series … [and to] enable the non-profit group to help preserve its video and audio archive.”