“I am thinking fast; new fears flood in at the speed of perception. I’m noticing some things you – the interviewing doctors – do not. Yes hallucinations, some of them; fight or flight is also heightening my senses. Paranoid hypotheses are disproved and discarded, others take their place. Some will stay with me for months to come. But I don’t know that there is any future. … The thought, ‘I’m experiencing psychosis’ – terrifying when it comes – is unavailable; it’s all too new for that.”
Tag: 07.16.15
Information Overload (Quantified And Pondered)
“More data has been created and stored since the turn of the millennium than in the entire history of humanity. Metaphors for information overload tend to fall into two categories: those that suggest addiction or lack of self-control, such as infomania, datamania, infobesity, databesity, dataholism, infostress, dataddiction, infovorism, datadithering, data dread; and those that suggest natural disaster, such as datanami, datageddon, dataclypse, data deluge, data smog, infoglut, information saturation, data swamp, drowning in data.”
Why I Write (Or Not)
“I no longer regret writing, or the life I have made along the way. I’ve learned too much and come too far, and I am in pursuit of an art form. It took a long time, and a lot of work, to get to this point, and I will never find an end to it. I have a problem that can keep me busy for the rest of my life. I have something to look forward to.”
University Philosophy Departments Are Overwhelmingly Male. Should We Care?
“What is the explanation for this peculiarity, and should it be a matter of concern? These two questions are interlinked. How far philosophy’s gender imbalance is bad depends on its causes. If it were the result of simple discrimination against women, for instance, then it would not only be unjust, but it would also be preventing some of the best-suited people from working as philosophers. But it is not obvious that discrimination is the right explanation, and it should not be taken for granted that any other causes for the imbalance would be similarly unacceptable.”
Charlie Hebdo Will Be Publishing No More Cartoons Of Muhammad
Editor Laurent Sourisseau: “We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever one wants, … [but] the mistakes you could blame Islam for can be found in other religions. … We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature.”
Turnaround Begins: Atlanta Symphony Posts Surplus After 11 Years Of Deficits
A spokesman for the Woodruff Arts Center, the ASO’s parent organization, “said early numbers show revenues exceeding expenses by a ‘solid six figures.’ ASO musicians, who went nine weeks without pay during the lockout [that began the season], will share 22 percent of the surplus.”
Soviet Hippies And The Test To Become A Berlin-Wall Border Guard: A Museum To Cold War-Era East Germany – In Los Angeles
“The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War was founded by Justinian Jampol, an Oxford-educated scholar from Los Angeles who channeled his youthful obsession with Cold War iconography into a DIY passion project that now holds over 100,000 items in its collection.” (audio)
When Theatre Folk Strike Back At Mean Old Critics
Douglas Gordon taking an axe to the wall of a theatre after bad reviews of his new production is but one tiny example. Critic Michael Billington offers some more – including Steven Berkoff’s notorious death threat.
Sex Workers Use Theatre To Campaign For Their Rights And Safety In Malawi
“Through theatre, the women in the group tell their stories to the people who need to hear them most: police officers, brothel owners, clients, men. The audience gathers in a circle and, in the midst of them, the women act out a scenario where they have been abused or mistreated. They then invite their audience to suggest how the story could have played out differently.”
Why Is Der Spiegel Calling Berlin’s Museums ‘Haphazard And Uninspired’?
“Few other places are in possession of so many treasures that are so poorly exhibited as Berlin. It’s as though cultural institutions here go out of their way to keep people from visiting.”