“We all know that art, music and nature are beautiful. They command the senses and incite emotion. Their impact is swift and visceral. How can a mathematical idea inspire the same feelings? Well, for one thing, there is something very appealing about the notion of universal truth — especially at a time when people entertain the absurd idea of alternative facts.”
Tag: 04.15.17
Netflix Gets To 100 Million Subscribers By Breaking The TV Business Model
“Shows like [teen suicide drama] 13 Reasons Why are very honest and raw and I’m not sure you’d find that on terrestrial TV and old school channels. Netflix has taken the model of [US cable channel] HBO, which revolutionised quality TV drama with shows like The Sopranos, and flown with it.”
When A New Opera Turns (Terrifyingly) Topical
Yes, it’s about Machiavelli. “Drawing from disparate political histories involving the Medicis, Hitler, Alexander Hamilton, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Osama bin Laden, the Machiavelli of the future, with Henry Kissinger as his sidekick, delivers a warning about abuses of power and lapses of political judgment. There is one ‘new prince’ that everyone in the audience was probably thinking of during the production, but he is conspicuously absent from this political soup.”
If You’re In Despair About Big Ideas, Don’t Be: They Can Still Change The World
If cognitive dissonance causes people – especially educated people – to cling to their beliefs even harder, what hope is there? Probably a sudden shock: “A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.”
Donna Leon’s Venice Books Have Become Darker And Darker As Climate Change Has Advanced
This is the 25th anniversary of the first Donna Leon book starring detective Giuseppe Brunetti, but it’s not the first one where the murders are related to crimes around the environment (indeed, in Venice, who could afford to ignore the rising waters?).
The Garden Bridge, Proposed For London When Boris Johnson Was Mayor, Has To Go
Rowan Moore is not having it: “It has wrung tens of millions out of the public purse on the basis of deceptions, distortions and facts that proved to be fake. … Its claims to fundraising prowess are exaggerated, its promised transport benefits minimal. Its backers assert overwhelming public support on the basis of a poll that told those polled nothing of the costs and drawbacks of the project.”
Like The Great Barrier Reef, London’s Orchestra Scene Is Dying – And Quickly
“The inertia of state funding, allied to the lack of imagination of arts centres, has sapped the fizz from London’s halls, like champagne bottles left uncorked for too long. Where once we were cocks of the concert walk, audiences in Munich and Milan cannot tell one London orchestra from the next. That’s how low we have sunk in five short years. So what’s to be done?”
An Argument Against Cultural Repatriation
“The idea of cultural continuity between the remains, some of which are thousands of years old — one of the most well-known, Kennewick Man, is, at 8,500 years old, older than the pyramids — and a contemporary group, is highly questionable; human populations are not bounded entities through time in this way. That a selected group can decide the future of remains — and the future of research — on the basis of their biology, is disturbing. Identity should not dictate the pursuit or closing down of knowledge.”