Morton’s terminology is “slowly infecting all the humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Tag: 06.15.17
The Importance Of Historical Fiction In Times Of Historical Turmoil
“Reading historical fiction not only puts our current events into a historical context, but also helps us understand and imagine and empathize with what people lived through in other times and places. It reminds us that other people, ordinary people, real people, have lived and survived and fallen in love, but also, died in these times of political turmoil before us.”
When Secondary Characters Get Novels Of Their Own
Anjum Hasan looks at the phenomenon of “minor-character elaboration” – from Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea (the story of Jane Eyre‘s madwoman in the attic) to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (how Ulysses’s wife and queen passed the twenty years waiting for his return) and onward. (Hasan also includes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, though we think that wasn’t the same thing.)
Alt-Right Sends Death Threats To Scholar For Article On Ancient Greek Statuary (To This We’ve Come)
Historian Sarah E. Bond wrote an essay reminding us, as others have before, that a great deal of Greek and Roman sculpture was not intended to be seen as milky-white marble – it was painted. As Bond puts it, the alt-right “viewed the piece as ‘liberal professor says that all white statues are racist.'”
The Problem Of Thinking That Consciousness Is A Scientific Question
“The spectacular advances of modern science have generated a mindset that makes potential limits to scientific inquiry intuitively difficult to grasp. Again and again we are given examples of seemingly insurmountable problems that yield to previously unimaginable answers. Just as some physicists believe we will one day have a Theory of Everything, many cognitive scientists believe that consciousness, like any physical property, can be unraveled. Overlooked in this optimism is the ultimate barrier: The nature of consciousness is in the mind of the beholder, not in the eye of the observer.”
Gibson Wants To Turn Its Guitar Business Into The “Nike Of The Music World”
Advanced sampling technology allows it to sound like any one of dozens of vintage electric or acoustic guitars at the touch of a button. A player can also quickly shift among any number of conventional and unconventional tuning setups at the touch of another button. And thanks to automatic tuning technology, one will never worry about it going out of tune. And that’s barely scratching the instrument’s high-gloss surface. “This has got more technology than you can shake a stick at.”
How Georgia O’Keeffe Created Her Personal Brand
She knew how she wanted to be seen, and she sculpted her own fame. Her paintings made her wealthy and famous. She was the highest-paid woman artist in New York City within a decade of moving there from Texas. But her self-presentation—the high priestess of the high desert in crepe dresses and dirty work boots—made her an icon.
Does The “Julius Caesar” Controversy Signal A Scary New Front In The Culture Wars?
Public Theatre’s Oskar Eustis believes that we have entered a frightening chapter in the cultural wars in which snippets of information are disseminated on the Web and elsewhere to discredit a piece of political art. “The thing that’s new is that somebody is using the arts as a way of manipulating people and lying about the arts. That’s the new toxic element in our culture.”
The Journalist As Serious Reader (As Opposed To Browsing Articles)
For one piece, the necessary reporting might include 20 books. Adam Gopnik writes with the morning coffee from 9 and reads after dinner until 11, usually for four hours each. “I’ve discovered that reading is actually one of those skills that increases exponentially the more of it you do, and it doesn’t stop improving the older you get, which is an encouraging fact,” he told me. For work, he now reads the average book, preferably with Mozart or Haydn playing, in one and a half, maybe two hours.
City Planners Are Predicting Drastically Fewer Cars In Our Cities. So What Will Happen To All The Road (And Parking) Space?
“It is with relatively high confidence that I predict you’re going to see a boom in landscape architecture. You will see innovation and invention that has never been possible, because suddenly, everyone’s going to have all this excess space.”