A Major Donation Of Art Elevates The Hirshhorn Collection

The Washington couple has decided to donate its Duchamp art to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where the works will raise the profile of the Smithsonian modern art museum. “This is the art world equivalent of the Wizards getting LeBron James,” said Hirshhorn board chairman Daniel Sallick. “Any museum in the world would want this collection.”

The Complicated Acceptance Of Black English

Black English is not a degraded variety of the language—it’s an alternate form of English. If a sentence like People be lookin’ at him funny seems unsophisticated because the be isn’t conjugated, try wrapping your head around the fact that the be also expresses, overtly, a nuance that the standard sentence would not—that this looking in question happens on a habitual basis.

Declining Skills Or Age Discrimination? Longtime Orchestra Musicians Quit Rather Than Be Evaluated

Steven Reed’s letter said he failed to blend with other players in the section and came in late to solos. He said he doesn’t need the hassle of the evaluation procedure. “My impression is that it is a form of discrimination,” Reed said. Once an orchestra member receives a warning letter, a meeting is held with the music director to discuss issues.

The Notion That Information Is Free Is A Dangerous One

There’s always been fake news but what’s different this time is that you can tailor the story to particular individuals, because you know the prejudice of this particular individual. The more people believe in free will, that their feelings represent some mystical spiritual capacity, the easier it is to manipulate them, because they won’t think that their feelings are being produced and manipulated by some external system.

H.F. ‘Gerry’ Lenfest, ‘One Of The Greatest Philanthropists Philadelphia Has Ever Seen,’ Dead At 88

After launching and building up the television company Suburban Cable and then selling it to Comcast, Lenfest spent the second part of his life giving away more than $1.3 billion dollars to arts and education. “He was chairman of the board of old-line institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Curtis Institute of Music, … and he willed new ones into existence.” Among those are the Museum of the American Revolution and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, to which he donated The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com (all of which he had acquired outright in 2014).

Our Public Intellectual Problem? Public Intellectuals Don’t Know Who The “Public” Is

When these brilliant people contemplated writing for the “public,” it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the “general reader,” seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves. Writing for the public awakened the slang of mass media. The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.

Why Read Horror When The World Is So Horrifying On Its Own?

The world is horrible, but horror books and horror movies give us examples of people who fight back against the horror, and sometimes win: “The banal evils of the world — children shot, neighbors exiled, selves reframed in an instant as inhuman threats — these are horrible, but they aren’t horror. Horror promises that the plot arc will fall after it rises. Horror spins everyday evil to show its fantastical face, literalizing its corroded heart into something more dramatic, something easier to imagine facing down. Horror helps us name the original sins out of which horrible things are born.”