Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.21.16

The Value of Intrinsic Value in the Arts: A Guest Post by Carter Gillies
In recent years an artist named Carter Gillies has written to me with some regularity in response to Jumper posts. I have always valued his letters, which are invariably insightful, provocative, warm, and encouraging. Recently, …read more
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2016-03-20

Historic days for US and Cuba, accompanied by jazz
Congratulations to the U.S. and Cuba for advancing our long overdue reset. It’s about time. Jazz at its best has linked our nations for decades, through the tangled history of corrupt dictatorship and revolution, missile crisis, failed invasion, bad relations and … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2016-03-21

Taking Folk Dancing into Today’s World
Tina Croll + Company performs in New York with Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-03-21

Thad & Mel: The Tradition Continues
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago the Rifftides Monday Recommendation was an  album of recently discovered recordings by the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. This evening, the PBS NewsHour closed with … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-03-21

[ssba_hide]

How We Got To America’s ‘Post-Fact’ Politics And Society

“Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error. That epistemological havoc has never ended: much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence.”