Do We Have Too Much Public Shame (Or Too Little)

“In recent decades, psychology research has found that feelings of shame can demoralize people or generate aggression because they make individuals feel bad about themselves. (This differentiates shame from guilt, which, because it focuses on a person’s acts rather than his or her character, can lead to apology and redress.) Today, public scholars like social work researcher Brené Brown continue to talk about these findings, urging those suffering from shame to throw the emotion aside and call their accusers to account – shaming the shamers, as it were.”

The Snippet, Decontextualized And Sometimes Fake, Is The Text Of The Instagram Age

The problem comes in when there’s no context – and there is no context on Instagram or Tumblr, at least not usually in a single inspirational post. “This kind of fragmented sharing is about words that springboard or support the ideas of the sharer. A sentence can be powerful, but without context, it remains general (or worse, generic)—accessible, open-endedly inspiring, and void of the rough, gritty detail that represents (and foments) critical response. There’s a limit to how much ‘idea’ can be shared in a single sentence.”

That Time John Philip Sousa Raged Against The Scourge Of Mechanical Music (Long Before Computers. Or Recordings)

His 1906 essay warns that mechanical music is “sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels” and was becoming a “substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.” Sousa was referring in this essay to recorded music, but also to mechanical instruments that played themselves–such as the player piano.

Bringing The Audience Inside The Orchestra

Adding dozens of chairs, the orchestra lets ticket-holders sit among the musicians, following underneath Bernard’s baton instead of staring at his back. “There’s a lot of talk about how classical music is stuffy and there are a lot of rules. And that’s kind of a deterrent to enjoying classical music. The question is – how do you turn classical music performance into more of an experience?”

The Book That May Bring Down South Africa’s President And Bring Up Its Book Market

What’s Zulu for the Streisand Effect? “South Africa’s small literary market has been lifted by one of the country’s largest political scandals. A new book detailing the “cancerous cabal” that has bankrolled Jacob Zuma’s presidency was bound to cause a sensation, but attempts to have the book banned have made it a rapid best-seller and possibly the country’s most bootlegged book.”

Art Historians Say Reproduction Fees Are Killing Art Scholarship

Historians face bills of thousands of pounds to illustrate academic books with little commercial potential, the 28 signatories say. “We urge the UK’s national museums to follow the example of a growing number of international museums and provide open access to images of publicly owned, out-of-copyright paintings, prints and drawings so that they are free for the public to reproduce,” the letter says.

Buddhist Thought Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think

Robert Wright, a scholar of science and religion, argues against the all-too-common belief in the West “that Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation – and that in a sense the point of Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation.” In fact, he writes, “not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make – many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought.”

Unknown Kurt Weill Song Surfaces In Berlin

“The piece, ‘Lied vom weissen Käse‘ (‘Song of the White Cheese’) – which was written for a Weimar-era musical revue and sung by the actress Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife – was recently found in an archive unrelated to Weill at the Free University of Berlin and is the most significant discovery of the composer’s music since the early 1980s. The song previously existed only in Lenya’s memory and was written off as chimerical.” (includes video)

How Might The Rise Of China Impact Western Values?

“The rise of China will foster a self-reflection of the Western Enlightenment heritage. Ultimately, it leads to a convergence of civilisations on the basis of cross pollination. Neither the Chinese nor the westerner can cling to their past glories, or stop the course of history. The Chinese have been intensively exposed to western civilisation and adapted to changes since the beginning of the last century. In this sense, they are ahead of the West.”

The Changing Role Of Movie Art Houses

What has changed, then, is not much the opportunity to see good films but the way they are packaged. In brief, we have gone from a time in the Sixties when the emphasis was placed on making a more or less agreed-upon canon available to the novice film buff, to a smorgasbord of “edgy” hors d’oeuvres and a neglect of the meat-and-potatoes classics.