Category: today’s top story

MEG scanners, which have been around for awhile, and which measure activity in the human brain, are suddenly becoming very popular with researchers. “You can look at how the networks of the brain are talking to each other in real time.”

“As it grows to 27 countries, the European Union is the most successful example of peaceful regime change in our time. More than half its member states were dictatorships well within living memory. Their advance towards liberal democracy has gone hand in hand with their advance towards membership of what is now the European Union. In every corner of the continent most people are better off and more free than they were half a century ago. Yet everyone knows that, beneath the surface, political Europe is not in party mood about itself. “

The arts have had a tough time getting respect from pop culture and government types in recent decades. But Steven Winn says that’s all going to change in 2007. Among Winn’s predictions for the year: Gwen Stefani makes Schubert hip again when she partners with the Cleveland Orchestra on a multi-year lieder project; and the National Endowment for the Arts suddenly finds itself on the receiving end of a $306 billion Congressional appropriation that no one will take credit for.

“A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control. As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.”

Ten years ago the Missouri legislature “enacted a law calling for half of the income taxes paid by out-of-state athletes and entertainers who worked in Missouri to be put in the Missouri Arts Council Trust Fund (also known as the Missouri Cultural Trust). But that hasn’t happened, and now th Kansas City Symphony is suing the state, charging it has shortchanged the fund by $83 million in principal and interest since 1987.

“As part of managing for his own death, Mr. Gehry has been trying to build the public personae of the people who work for him, trying to direct some of the limelight that seems always oriented towards him in their direction. In the catalogs and exhibits devoted to his work, he makes sure to mention the people who worked with him on his various projects.”

“Here in the Western world, we live defined by media: We are what we watch, what we listen to. (A few of us are still the papers we read.) And because this identification is so strong and thoroughgoing, one can feel that anything that has ever been recorded or taped or filmed should be available to hear or see, and that there is even something heroic, in a Promethean way, about those who arrange to make this happen.”