No, that doesn’t mean they tried to be savvy marketers: they marked their books with hot branding irons. And these marcas de fuego weren’t put on the cover, binding, or frontispiece; they were burned onto the sides of the pages as the books were held shut. Jessica Leigh Hester gives us the background.
Tag: 06.22.18
Why A Nationwide NPR Or PBS Fund Drive Has Never Worked Out
“Why don’t all public broadcasters coordinate on a national pledge drive? … Though it may sound promising, a systemwide pledge drive for public media would get bogged down in logistics and clash with the system’s localized business model.” April Simpson explains how/why.
What Gets To Be A Science?
The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical. Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the “demarcation problem,” the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a “family resemblance” among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called “science” that the rest of the world should recognize as such.
Why MoviePass Is A Terrible Idea
Every cent you don’t fork over for each free or super-cheap service you use is balanced by the advertising revenue the service hopes to make off of you. That’s not just true of the app-centric, surveillance-saturated economy of 2018 — it’s basically how the entertainment biz has worked for over a century. If you’re not entirely supported by sales or subscriptions, you’re working with advertisers. MoviePass is no different, but they are a fascinating case study in how, as modern data-driven advertising risks extinction via overdue regulation, the most cynical impulses of “old school” advertising threaten to turn everyone off just as much.
Words Matter: Why Ayn Rand Is Still A Bestseller (And How To Deal With It)
Hoping that Rand’s ideas will, in time, just go away is not a good solution to the problem. The Fountainhead is still a bestseller, 75 years since first publication. And perhaps it’s time to admit that Rand is a philosopher – just not a very good one. It should be easy to show what is wrong with her thinking, and also to recognise, as John Stuart Mill did in On Liberty (1859), that a largely mistaken position can still contain some small elements of truth, as well as serving as a stimulus to thought by provoking us to demonstrate what is wrong with it.
Trying To Catalog Every Language In India (There Are 780 So Far)
“[Ganesh] Devy, a former professor of English from the western state of Gujarat, launched the People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010. … With single-minded ambition, he put together a team of 3,000 volunteers from all parts of the country. Since 2013, the PLSI has published 37 volumes, featuring detailed profiles of each of India’s languages. The project is expected to be completed by 2020 with 50 volumes.” Sunaina Kumar reports on how Devy and his team do their work and what they’ve discovered.
How Adrian Ghenie Became An Art Market Phenomenon
“To hit that level of popularity and power is a huge challenge for someone who is just 40 and has to stand in front of the empty canvas knowing that the world is paying ridiculously large sums of money at auction for them. Adrian’s response was to continue to experiment… and that is something that makes people feel like we will still be looking at this guy in 50 years.”
What Is ‘Bucking’? It’s ‘A Furiously Energetic, Hyper-Athletic’ Underground Dance Genre
“It’s a style of dancing that’s both hidden and mainstream – simultaneously a part of everything from underground clubs to Beyoncé videos and dance routines, including her recent Coachella extravaganza. … The style was originally invented by women” – in fact, by the marching band’s dance team at a historically black college in Mississippi – “but bucking was soon adopted by gay men in the south, who took what they saw on the college sports field and moved it to the club.”
Illegal Excavation In West Bank Raises More Questions About Museum Of The Bible
“The Green family’s evangelical Museum of the Bible has been funding a number of scholarly projects, including an illegal excavation in the West Bank. This funding could potentially influence the direction of biblical scholarship and will certainly influence how the public understands the Bible and the ancient world.”
Study: Democracy Is Losing Ground Worldwide
A new study confirms that disheartening diagnosis. It finds 2.5 billion people—about a third of the world’s population—live in nations where democracy is in retreat. “Media autonomy, freedom of expression, and the rule of law have undergone the greatest decline among democracy metrics in recent years,” lead author Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburn in Sweden, said in announcing the findings. “This worrisome trend makes elections less meaningful around the world.”