“It was singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie who, early in 2017 at outset of the Canada 150 hoopla that offended many Indigenous people, counselled everyone to “Keep calm and decolonize.” But what exactly does that mean? After centuries of contact, can you really tease apart the threads of settler and Indigenous culture?”
Tag: 11.25.17
What Allan Bloom Saw In Rejection Of Elites
“Underneath a nonjudgmental relativism, Bloom saw a creeping nihilism: believing that all judgments of value had equal weight, the students ended up not believing or aspiring to much of anything at all. As a result, they no longer aspired to learn the truth, but rather to be “open-minded.” Incapable of treating moral questions and culture as anything other than matters of personal preference, they couldn’t be bothered to take seriously the task of self-reinvention that their education demanded of them.”
Did Leonardo Paint A Replica Of His “Last Supper”?
“The theory of the Young Leonardo co-authors is that King Louis commissioned Leonardo and his workshop to paint a life-size copy on canvas of ‘The Last Supper’ for the king to take back to France. As Isbouts and Brown continued their research, the evidence supporting this theory began to pile up.”
Why Are Teachers Still Giving Lectures?
Seth Godin: “I know why we used to do it. We used to do it because a lecture is a thoughtful exposition, a reasoned, researched argument that delivers a lot of information in a fairly condensed period of time. And before technology, the best way to deliver that exposition was to do it live. But now?”
Actors In London Lead A ‘No Gray Area’ Protest Of Sexual Harassment In The Theatre
The silent protest, an action performed with the support of the National Theatre, was meant to be for solidarity with those who can’t yet speak up and for visibility of the problem. “Those attending were asked to wear black and white clothing and were provided with white ribbons to wear.”
Can This Town In Croatia Parlay A Rusting Yacht Into Status As A ‘Capital Of Culture’?
It’s not just any yacht – it belonged to Yugoslav leader (and uniter) Josep Tito. “If officials have their way, Tito’s boat will become a museum to display the complex history of Rijeka and serve as a point of pride for the nation.” Alert: Croatia’s far-right politicians, whose power is surging, are not into this idea.
Major Advertisers Freeze Spending On YouTube Over That Platform’s Inability To Stop Sexual Predators
Adidas, DeutscheBank, Mars, Cadbury, Lidl and more have pulled ads entirely from YouTube after The Times of London discovered that “the marketers’ ads had run in videos with young girls in underwear, doing the splits, and rolling around in bed — which included sexually inappropriate comments posted by viewers.”
A Landscape Artist, Where The Land Is Filled With Markers Of Unceasing Digital Surveillance
Trevor Paglen, for the last two decades (yes, digital surveillance has been going on for that long and longer) “has been on a mission to photograph the unseen political geography of our times. His art tries to capture places that are not on any map – the secret air bases and offshore prisons from which the war on terror has been fought – as well as the networks of data collection and surveillance that now shape our democracies, the cables, spy satellites and artificial intelligences of the digital world.”
How Can We Coax More Americans To Read?
Basically? Americans are clueless about how reading works, so they train people badly. We need to spread more basic knowledge about how the world works, because that’s the only way to fill in the gaps that all writers leave. And we need to (this is a real surprise) fix standardized testing. “If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom — knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.”