Why the Unplugging Movement Doesn’t Really Make Sense

“But how quickly the digital age turned into the age of technological anxiety, with our beloved devices becoming something to fear, not enjoy. What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the ‘real’ world around us represents one effort to control it. … [Yet] is it any less real when we fall in love and break up over Gchat than when we get fired over e-mail and then find a new job on LinkedIn?”

Cinema Needs Short Films – And We Need More Places to See Them

Richard Brody: “The classic device for releasing short films – the compilation film, for which filmmakers are brought together to make new work on a unifying theme – is, despite its noble pedigree, almost dead. … Good short films don’t get the attention that they deserve, which is all the more grievous as there are some terrific short films being made.”

Joseph Kerman, Musicologist and Critic, Dead at 89

Best known for his dismissal of Tosca as a “shabby little shocker” in his 1956 book Opera as Drama, Kerman “was a man of many parts: a scholar whose work on such topics as Beethoven and the Renaissance madrigal reflected deep research and study; a disciplinary gadfly who almost single-handedly changed the direction of academic musicology; a powerful and influential teacher; and a prolific public intellectual.”