"After ample reflection and prayer, I have made the painful decision to downsize our blessed hamlet. Lord be praised, not all is lost. The petting zoo will continue to prosper, and the gift shop will actually be receiving an expansion. However, we will be purging many of the village’s less popular features." - The New Yorker
Originalists and non-originalists agree that constitutional interpretation must begin with the text of the document. But originalists pretend that their method of interpretation is value-free. “This desire for value-neutral judging is an impossible quest. Balancing of competing interests is inescapable." - LA Review of Books
Philosophically, the most important thing about grief is that it’s not always a form of self-pity. It’s not selfish. There are aspects of grief that are completely other-directed, that are just about the loss of the person you love. Extinguishing grief would be a failure to appreciate reality. - Nautilus
We’ll see if Saturday night business is so bad that that this weekend becomes the lowest of 2022, unseating that of Jan. 28-30 when all movies grossed $34.87M per Comscore. - Deadline
Everything about discursive social media is suddenly open to question. What sort of news and discussion should it host and encourage? What should be its attitude to participation, networking, user rights and free speech? What should be its business model? What societal role should it seek to play? - New Statesman
“The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.” - The New Yorker
"We're not talking about canceling Tchaikovsky, but rather about pausing performances of his works until Russia ceases its bloody invasion. Ukrainian cultural venues have already done this with him and other Russian composers. We're calling on our allies to do the same." - NPR
Hollywood sees this an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them. That delusion is hard to sustain when the masses can’t be bothered to come. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy. - The New York Times
KPOP marketed its characters over social media, leveraging some of the same tools and tactics that brought K-pop’s biggest names to widespread fame. Unfortunately, KPOP’s fictional groups haven’t yet reached the same success. Creating internet fandom, it turns out, is hard to do. - The Verge
For the past month, the fate of the E.N.O. has made headlines here. Musicians, critics and politicians have been arguing over whether the decision to cut the company’s funding is a sensible response to a declining interest in opera, or an act of cultural vandalism. - The New York Times
The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number of hours we have in a day. - The New York Times
The attack has wreaked havoc as the Met prepares for a string of holiday productions. At this time of year, the company’s ticketing systems typically handle about $200,000 in sales each day. - The New York Times
While many commentators at the beginning of the pandemic endorsed reading as a straightforward way to relax, our readers showed that the practice morphed and took on new forms and meanings. - The Conversation
We can imagine “heights of flourishing” that tower above the life we know now, but human minds and bodies are capable of climbing only so high. There is a limit to how much we can feel, how deeply we can think, how fast we can move. - American Scholar
Beyond the traditional five senses, neuroscientific research also examines proprioception (sensing your muscles, their location, and their movements) and the vestibular system, which regulates the sense of orientation and balance in space. - The Conversation
