Like unmetered water, an all-you-can-eat buffet, or an unlimited cellphone contract, the new streaming music services create a different set of incentives for both customers and suppliers. To apply these changes to a mature ownership-based market, we have to forget a lot of things we didn’t even realize we had learned. The question we have to ask is not “Should I stream my stuff?” but “How does the existence of streaming services change my job?”.
Shock Of The New – Why We Have To Re-Read To Really Appreciate And Enjoy Art
“When we perceive something new for the first time we cannot really perceive it because we lack the appropriate structure that allows us to perceive it. Our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key—for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal—is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key.”
Here’s How The Collecting Of High-End Art Has Changed In The Past 25 Years
More contemporary art. Fewer Americans and more Asian collectors…
The Key To Rereading A Text (Metaphorical Pun Alert!)
Philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti suggests that “our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key – for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal – is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key. … The next time we meet or perceive the object/key it will open the lock prepared for it in the brain.” Tim Parks unpacks the simile.
A Rant Against “Critical Thinking”
It involves a chain of “and/or” activities that can happen in so many contexts (including the most ordinary “experience”) that one would be hard pressed to find a place where it isn’t happening, on some level. It is a sort of mental Swiss Army Knife, able to unfold a range of analytic tools depending on the circumstances.
South Florida Is Losing Its Only Classical Radio Station
“Minnesota-based American Public Media is selling their Classical South Florida radio stations to Education Media Foundation, a California religious broadcaster for $21.7 million … There has been no announcement of the sale on the stations’s airwaves or on its Classical South Florida website.”
We Need Puppets To Keep Making Fun Of Us, Say French Politicians
When the owner of the television network Canal+ said that the satirical show Les Guignols de l’Info (roughly, “The News Puppets”) said that there was “a bit too much mockery” of politicians, and there were suggestions that the program would be canceled, it was the subjects of the mockery who leapt to the Guignols’ defense.
Web 2.0 Doesn’t Work, And Here’s A Demonstration Of Why
“The Web 2.0 dream has always been to outsource all of the hard jobs to your users—that unpaid enthusiasts will do all the work of creating your content, curating your content, and promoting your content out of love, and all you have to do is pay some techies to keep the lights on.”
Why There’s So Much Nostalgia For The Lost TV Of One’s Youth (And Why It’s Better To Let Those Shows Go)
“Our nostalgia is greedy. It’s not enough to look back fondly on the past; now we are rebooting it. Our nostalgia compels us to go beyond rewatching dusty old VCR tapes, to actually wanting fleeting childhood obsessions to be revived and re-enacted to fit our own times.”
When DIY Education Came From Someplace Other Than YouTube
“Self-education went beyond solitary reading. For many, literary societies — called ‘the literary’ — marked the highlight of intellectual and social life, as young men and women gathered at night to debate, mingle and flirt. One young woman surveyed her entertainment options in rural Kansas and concluded: ‘We just have the jolliest, best times at the Literary.'”
Reinventing A Tradition Of African Portraiture
Omar Victor Diop: “I wanted to bring these rich historical characters into the current conversation about the African diaspora and contemporary issues around immigration, integration and acceptance.”
The Man Who Sculpted Disneyland – And Made Pirates Out Of Churchgoers
“Gibson’s handiwork includes the buccaneers of the popular Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, the fearsome ghosts and goblins of the Haunted Mansion, the colorful birds of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room and the global village children of It’s a Small World. He created the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln that became the first Audio-Animatronic figure.”
Jon Vickers, One of 20th Century’s Great Heroic Tenors, Dead At 88
“A Vickers performance in the opera house was a grand, sweeping, overriding affair. It was often a performance of extremes, something more readily comparable to what Marlon Brando or Zero Mostel might do than to what his operatic colleagues did.”
Let’s Face It: Empathy Is A Choice
“Empathy for people unlike us can be expanded, it seems, just by modifying our views about empathy.”
The Biggest Shock In Harper Lee’s New Novel: Atticus Finch, Unrepentant Racist
“Atticus Finch — the crusading lawyer of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ whose principled fight against racism and inequality inspired generations of readers — is depicted in ‘Watchman’ as an aging racist who has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, holds negative views about African-Americans and denounces desegregation efforts.”
Is Rock, With Its Simple Chords And Overriding Beat, The Sound Of Mass Complacency?
“So powerful was the rock beat that all other attributes of the music were presented as secondary, or totally inconsequential. ‘ “Positive” lyrics are mostly a sop to minds that do not want to know what they are thinking,’ he wrote.”
A National Memorial Should Not Be Designed To Please One Family
“Critics in Congress insist that there will be no monument built without final approval by the Eisenhower family. For Congress to yield such power to family members, however, cuts against the whole idea of a national consensus to honor a national hero.”