He retained the enthusiasm of a fan, but it was married to the expressive virtuosity of a master writer who could extract from his typewriter something akin to what others drew from their saxophones and trumpets. It was almost as if he were a jazz musician himself, but one who wrote essays for The New Yorker instead of soloing over “I Got Rhythm” chords. – City Journal
Tag: 09.20
Burning Knowledge – It’s Happened Before. In The Digital Age, Even More A Threat
Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second. A California-based digital service, the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. “Archiving the datasets created by the big tech companies, such as the advertisements on Facebook, the posts on Twitter, or the ‘invisible’ user data harvested by the adtech companies is one of the major challenges facing the institutions charged with the preservation of knowledge.” – Literary Review
Why Do Some Technologies Transform Our World And Others Don’t
Although the private sector brought electricity to the big cities—New York, Chicago, St. Louis—the federal government’s Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to much of America, helping to make radio, electric appliances, television and telecommunications part of everyone’s daily lives. A good deal of private investment created these technologies, but the transformations that they wrought were enabled by the “hidden hand” of government, and citizens often experienced their value in unanticipated ways. – Scientific American
Isaac Stern Was Really Famous. So Why Has His Star Faded?
A century after his birth, Stern is no longer nearly so well remembered as Bernstein, whose posthumous celebrity remains undiminished. By contrast, Stern is essentially unknown to Americans under the age of 60, very few of whom listen to classical music. Moreover, he is increasingly known to older music lovers less for his playing than for his ancillary activities, among them his coaching and encouragement of such protégés as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Yo-Yo Ma; his groundbreaking 1979 visit to Communist China, where he played with Chinese musicians who had had no contact with their Western counterparts since the Cultural Revolution; and, above all, the pivotal role that he played in saving Carnegie Hall from the wrecker’s ball in 1960. – Commentary