Category: ideas

“If it is true to say in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election that America has never been more politically divided, then it is equally true that the battle for control of the country’s cultural landscape has never been more bitterly fought… Ironically, the push for more controls on what is shown [on television] is coming largely from right-wing, religious politicians and organisations who have long argued that market forces should prevail in every aspect of society: education, healthcare, social services – everything except broadcasting, it seems.”

The English language as we know it today has deep roots in both Latin and Greek, and that dual history can sometimes cause conflicts, especially when two different words develop independently over the centuries to mean the same thing in two different English-speaking cultures. For instance, North Americans use the Latin-based word “quadriplegic” to describe an individual who has lost the use of all four limbs; in the UK, the common form is the Greek-derived “tetraplegic.” So, who cares? Well, linguists do, especially since many such idiomatic expressions have begun to gradually vanish from several Western languages.

The Democratic Party convention arrives in Boston next week, and Holland Cotter says that the pols could do worse than to leave the convention hall for a few hours of good old-fashioned Bostonian-American culture. “Utopian thought is a visionary version of yes-saying; principled dissent among the most constructive ways of saying no. The two are flip sides of the same coin; together they can bring out the best, and curb the worst, in human behavior. Boston knows all about them.”

“The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider a bill Thursday that would hold technology companies liable for any product they make that encourages people to steal copyright materials. Critics say the bill would effectively outlaw peer-to-peer networks and prohibit the development of new technologies, including devices like the iPod.”

“Scanners, computer-aided design software and automated milling devices are assisting sculptors and in some cases replacing them, creating detailed pieces from slabs of marble and reverse-engineering complex forms. The result is the seemingly oxymoronic concept of mass customization, in which infinite copies of infinite variations are possible as long as there is stone to quarry. But the harnessing of these granite-grinding Xerox machines, able to duplicate just about any sculpture, may also blur the line between what is authentic and what is not. Is such a sculpture art, or merely a computer-aided copy?”

“Just how inventive can an anonymous group of people be? Could an online mob produce a poem, a novel, or a painting? We like to believe that the blue bolt of artistic inspiration strikes only the individual. ‘[The] group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man,’ John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. Hollywood scriptwriters constantly moan over how their brilliant ideas were mutilated by studio ‘editing by committee’. But collaboration has a long history in art.

Why are arts people so wary when scientists tread into arts territory? “Humanists are trained to make judgments and support them with a range of qualitative evidence and arguments; scientists are trained to test arguments with empirical, replicable evidence and to use quantification as a tool. Interdisciplinary work will flourish when both sides realize that scientific questions about art do not replace humanistic ones. They are simply different. The disciplines of the sciences and art history ought to trade insights rather than insults.”

“The equivalent of snow on a TV screen, visual noise is a major but poorly understood part of the daily input into our minds. The noise can have many sources, including changes in the number of light particles hitting cells in the eye, which can alter people’s perception of facial expression.”

With the retirement of William F. Buckley, the intellectual conservative movement he founded seems to be in danger of fading into the past. After all, as one prominent conservative thinker puts it, the movement was founded to “defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism… The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?” Does the current dominance of the Republican Party in national politics mean that conservatism has won out, or has it merely dumbed itself down to achieve short-term victory? It’s a problem that a new crop of young conservatives are already wrestling with, and there is a definite hope among the old guard that Mr. Buckley’s ideas will find a voice among the youth.