“Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism? This essay is not just for those who identify with the canaries in the mine, but for anyone who browses through current journals and is left with an impression of deadness or meanness. I believe that the progressive fervor of the humanities, while it reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction.”
Tag: 04.16
How Word Processers Changed How (And What) Writers Write
“What made word-processing devices much more than just souped-up typewriters was not only that they gave you the ability to edit at the same time that you wrote, or that they eliminated or seriously curtailed the effort of correcting from typewritten pages. Seeing text revealed on a screen, even in the technologically costive form offered by the earliest word processors, provided an unprecedented opportunity to picture the manuscript as a whole and with an immediacy that typewriting didn’t permit.”
Abu Dhabi’s Culture Explosion: What Money Can Buy
“It remains to be seen whether Saadiyat Island can become a true international cultural hub or nothing more than a costly mirage.”
The Personal Memories We Think Of As Making Up Our Identities – What If We Didn’t Have Them? Here’s A Woman Who Doesn’t, And Never Has
“Susie McKinnon has no core memories that she is aware of. But there can be no doubt of her personality. … She has a job and she has hobbies, values, beliefs, opinions, a nucleus of friends. Though she doesn’t remember being a part of the anecdotes that shaped her into this person, she knows very well who she is. Which raises the question: Just how expendable is this supposedly essential part of being human after all?”
Lebrecht: Has London’s Classical Music Scene Gone Flat?
“This is a piece I hoped never to write and each word is wrung from me with regret. But recent chats with regular concertgoers have confirmed the growling in my gut that some life force has vanished from London’s music in the past couple of years. The causes are diverse.”
We Analyzed 8,000 Hollywood Movie Scripts To See Gender Balance
“We Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.”
“Creativity” Is Being Packaged Up As A Path To Success. We Should Be Dubious
When so much of the academy is given over to the study of creative minds; when revolutionary movements are so easily transformed into management lessons; and when liberals abase themselves before “innovators” and the “creative class”, one starts to understand why inequality is increasing at a gallop and why our leftish party seems uninterested in doing anything about it.
When Meryl Streep Got Slapped By Dustin Hoffman (And Won Her First Oscar For It)
“Benton heard the slap and saw Meryl charge into the hallway. We’re dead, he thought. The picture’s dead. She’s going to bring us up with the Screen Actors Guild. Instead, Meryl went on and acted the scene. … As far as she was concerned, she could conjure Joanna’s distress without taking a smack to the face, but Dustin had taken extra measures. And he wasn’t done.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates , From Writing Journalism To Writing Marvel Comics
“But when all the fantasy and reverie faded, and the time to actually write Black Panther came, those principles turned out to be not as primary as I’d thought.”