“I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way. And the pressure, I feel, is growing, not just from provincial academics such as Friess but from my own peers, whom I witness daily lacerating themselves – perhaps under the influence of the academics who are the only people now able to give them employment – for their moral failings.”
Archives for March 9, 2014
Why Does Anyone Get A Ph.D. And What Do You Do With It After You Get It?
“I didn’t need a Ph.D. to work at Kickstarter, just like I wouldn’t have needed a Ph.D. to wait tables (though it adds color to both). In truth, nobody needs a Ph.D. Ok technically you need one to be a college professor, but it is not an indicator of whether you will be a good college professor.”
How An Orchestra Looks Affects How You Think It Sounds
“Participants across the board were better at identifying the more accomplished groups by watching them, not by listening to them. In fact, even when music and video were combined in clips, it was actually harder for participants to identify the top groups than by video alone.”
Yes, White People Should Belly Dance (If They Do It Respectfully)
“Appropriation can be insensitive or disrespectful in all sorts of particular instances. But often, it is wonderful.”
Are TV Cases Clogging The UK’s Criminal Courts – And Should The Punishment Become Less Dire?
In 2012, “180,000 people were prosecuted for not paying their licence – which is needed to watch or record live broadcasts on any device – accounting for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions that year.”
Sheila MacRae, AKA Alice Kramden In ‘The Honeymooners’ Sketches, Dead At Age 92
“When friends and relatives wished her a happy 90th birthday in 2011, her family said in a statement, she replied, ‘I am only 90 in London.'”
How Science Fiction Books And Movies Changed Development In California
“This was so accepted as a likely trajectory for the city that it was written into an LA redevelopment plan as a warning of what could happen were the plan not adopted. The plan, LA 2000: A City for the Future, calls this ‘the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities.'”
Breathing New Life Into Books Long After The Author Dies
“Somewhere between the provocative rethinking of canonical literature and the fan-fiction mashup, there lies the polite posthumous pastiche.”
Gerard Mortier, Feisty Opera Visionary, Dies At 70
“These clashes were always expressions of Mr. Mortier’s bracing and intellectually charged vision of opera, and his disdain for the decorous irrelevance often associated with it.”
Women, Art, And Engineering At The Google Cultural Institute
“I realised that a lot of women’s work was not well documented. I wanted to keep working on a project that would group together information and archives about women artists, and I thought the best vehicle for that would be the web.”