Category: ideas

It appears that you no longer need to have your own army to be considered a powerful individual on the global playing field. In fact, if the tapes that have been airing on Arab satellite channels are any indication, all you need is a portable video camera, or, failing that, a cassette recorder. We’ve all heard the old credo that “information is power,” but these days, it seems that the efficient dissemination of information, and a keen grasp of how to make use of the global media, is as important as the information itself.

“Music is still a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in skills that researchers are trying to tease apart. No one really knows why music is found in all cultures, why most known systems of music are based on the octave, why some people have absolute pitch and whether the brain handles music with special neural circuits or with ones developed for other purposes. Recent research, however, has produced a number of theories about the brain and music.”

People seem to be throwing the term ‘fascist’ around a lot these days, and when you think about it, no one really seems to have any idea what it means anymore. Oh, sure, everyone knows that fascists are bad guys, and no one wants to be publicly identified as one. But how exactly can Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, John Ashcroft, and parents who send their children to bed early all be fascists? Alexander Stille is concerned that such a fascinating and evocative word may be losing its meaning altogether. It may be time for a gentle reminder that ‘fascist’ is not a synonym for ‘powerful person who makes me want to scream.’

“How do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy – and then how do we feel after the actual experience? For example, how do we suppose we’ll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we’ll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions — the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck — are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events.”

“Nowadays, some kind of education before the age of 6 has become common, whether it comes in federally funded Head Start programs or at expensive Manhattan preschools with admissions procedures to rival Harvard’s. President Bush’s recent proposals to steer Head Start funds to the states while stiffening the program’s academic standards have stirred up debate over whether such an approach would widen inequalities or narrow them. They have also raised the age-old question of just how our youngest children, rich or poor, really learn.”

“The artist serving as his or her own art form is hardly a new phenomenon. Andy Warhol is remembered as much for the wigs and the blank responses to interview questions as for his soup cans and screen-printed repetition. Yet this branding of the artist as the product itself dovetails all too well with a contemporary culture fixated with transient fame and unwarranted celebrity. Ours is, after all, an age in which celebrity no longer requires even the pretence of achievement or charm. Set against such an environment, the artist-as-art phenomenon lies somewhere between a metaphysical statement and an egomaniacal disorder.”

“The issue of patents for software and business methods has been causing a stir in America ever since the Patent and Trademark Office started issuing patents on internet business methods in 1998, most famously that for one-click shopping. Proponents argue that these patents provide the necessary incentives to innovate at a time when more inventions are computer-related. Critics claim that such intellectual monopolies hinder innovation, because software giants can use them to attack fledgling competitors. Moreover, as software is often built on the achievements of others, writing code could become a legal hurdle race. By analogy, if Haydn had patented the symphony form, Mozart would have been in trouble.”

Teaching is a profession which is constantly made to sound more glamorous and fulfilling than it ever is in reality. Inspiring young people to learn Great Things seems like a noble vocation, but in practice, too many teachers are left battling the double demons of boredom and disdain in their students. “In time I would learn that language and literature wouldst sucketh forever and that life at home (wherever that was this week) sucked like a veritable vortex… I wanted to engage them in critical thinking, but surely nothing could suck more than that, and this was a shame, because I’d gone back to school as an old bag just to get a credential to teach it.”