Wasn’t the printing press was the crucial factor in the rapid spread of Martin Luther’s ideas through Europe? Not exactly, and certainly not by itself.: the real key was the social networks that passed around “the new media of their day – pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts … Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.”
Tag: 12.17.11
When Behavioral Economists Go Christmas Shopping
Dan Ariely: “Many of my economist friends have a problem with gift-giving. They view the holidays not as an occasion for joy but as a festival of irrationality, an orgy of wealth-destruction.” Yet for behavioral economists, “gifts aren’t irrational. It’s just that rational economists have failed to account for their genuine social utility.”
What You Will (Biology Or…)
“The idea that the mind exists separately from the body has a long history; Descartes invoked it during the 17th century. But in recent years opinion has shifted somewhat behind the notion that people are constrained by their physical embodiment. Individuals are suspected of being predisposed to eat compulsively or drink excessively, and various other characteristics are thought to have a genetic basis.”
The Truth Behind Christmas Carols
“Christmas [as celebrated today] is, of course, a largely 19th-century invention: so are all those carols. Most of them aren’t hugely ancient. Most of them aren’t even carols, if you’re strict on definition. And the ones that are tend not to have particularly spiritual origins, mixing the sacred with the secular.”
Notes On Life In The (Artist) Colonies
“I know what you’re thinking: sex! Drugs! Egos! Art! In all those respects, yes and no. A certain number of people turn up at the colonies with an indecorous agenda, but … [for] most artists at a colony, this is the only place to get away from all that.” Alumnus Jan Swafford gives us the goods on Yaddo and MacDowell.
Cesária Evora, 70, “Barefoot Diva” From Cape Verde
2004 Grammy-winner Evora, who often performed barefoot to remind her audience of the poverty on Cape Verde, “was best known for singing songs of longing, and her style brought comparisons to the American jazz singer Billie Holiday.”
Away From The Loud Street, Music Flourishes In Gaza
One 11-year-old at Gaza’s only music school prefers to listen to Justin Bieber but loves playing the traditional qanun. “When I play, I feel happy, I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I feel different, I’m in a different place.”
Want To Earn A Profit? Let Nonprofit Theatres Show You How
“Broadway’s three nonprofit companies … look more like profit-making, Tony-seeking hit factories these days.” Hurray! The theatres aren’t dying. But is this drive for profit harming the creation of new work?
Digital Doesn’t Kill Books (Really! It’s Saving Print)
Four new ventures into the rapidly mutating world of publishing bravely chart new territory – or is it ground Dickens, magazines and T.V. shows have already covered?
Money Back For A Maybe-Pollock? It’s Happened Before
The Knoedler Gallery, embroiled in a $17 million lawsuit about one painting, refunded $2 million for a different supposed Pollock in 2003.