Why We Can Talk About Books We’ve Never Read

“Good libraries hold several millions of books: even if we read a book a day, we would read only 365 a year, around 3,600 in ten years, and between the ages of ten and eighty we’ll have read only 25,200. A trifle. On the other hand, any Italian who’s had a good secondary education knows perfectly well that they can participate in a discussion, let’s say, on Matteo Bandello, Francesco Guicciardini, Matteo Boiardo, on the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, or on Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, knowing only the name and something about the critical context, but without ever having read a word.”

Portland’s Reed College Is One Of The Most Liberal In The Country. And It’s In Turmoil

A Hum protest is visually striking: Up to several dozen RAR supporters position themselves alongside the professor and quietly hold signs reading “We demand space for students of color,” “We cannot be erased,” “Fuck Hum 110,” “Stop silencing black and brown voices; the rest of society is already standing on their necks,” and so on. The signs are often accompanied by photos of black Americans killed by police.

What Does It Mean To Be A Mid-Career Composer?

Also, can there be such a thing during a time of tenuous and not at all secure employment, if employment there is at all? “Mid-career generally seems to refer to someone who has spent a good number of years pursuing their vocation following their formal studies, but is not yet approaching old age and retirement. This can be a somewhat confusing designation for many of us.”

The Food Writer Who Lost Her Sense Of Smell

A bike tangles with a pedestrian – and the pedestrian, the food writer, gets a concussion. “Given that I’d never lost consciousness or suffered any memory impairment, I had unilaterally decided that the injury would be nothing more than a story with which to regale friends and acquaintances at future cocktail parties. Apparently, this memo never made it to certain parts of my cranium.”

The Power Of Words In A Bilingual MFA Program

In one seminar at The University of Texas at El Paso’s MFA program, where at least 12 of the 20 students are native Spanish speakers, “Many of the students around the table comment in Spanish, sometimes switching languages to highlight a point for the native English speakers. Ms. Cote-Botero hangs back, periodically interjecting in either language. A student from Mexico City consults another from Las Vegas on a passage in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, occasionally glancing at Google Translate on a laptop.”

How A Jazz Musician Is Redefining Culture At At The Kennedy Center

Not so long ago, Moran’s eclectic, adventurous approach to jazz would have placed him well outside the aesthetic boundaries of Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts . But in the past few years, the big white box on the Potomac has opened its venues to jazz in tandem with skateboarders, stand-up comics, dancers, painters and rappers. This redefining of what it means to be the “national cultural center” is, to a large extent, the doing of Jason Moran.

This Year’s Winners Of Canada’s Governor General’s Writing Awards

“Thomas Hynes’s We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, described in a release from the Canada Council as a portrait of a man’s hilarious yet disturbing journey from St. John’s to Vancouver, is the winner of the English fiction category. Richard Harrison’s On Not Losing my Father’s Ashes in the Flood took home the top poetry prize, Hiro Kanagawa’s Indian Arm was the winner under the drama genre and The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Graeme Wood was the pick for non-fiction.”

Why World-In-Decline Thinking Is Not Helpful

“Our declinist age is noteworthy in one important way. It’s not just the Westerns who are in trouble; thanks to globalisation, it’s the Resterners too. In fact, we are all, as a species, in this mess; our world supply chains and climate change have ensured that we are poised before a sixth mass extinction together. We should worry less about our lifestyle and more about life itself.”

Scientists: Our Bodies Feel Music, Not Just Hear It

“The past few decades of work in the cognitive sciences of music have demonstrated with increasing persuasiveness that the human capacity for music is not cordoned off from the rest of the mind. On the contrary, music perception is deeply interwoven with other perceptual systems, making music less a matter of notes, the province of theorists and professional musicians, and more a matter of fundamental human experience.”