culture
It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.
The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction
Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows — ‘What a world you’ve got inside you.’ | The On Being Project
onbeing.orgSalmon don’t have a cosmic story that they talk about. They are born into the world and they instinctively know the direction in which they need to swim. It’s built into their DNA, inherent in their being. People, on the other hand, need stories that are created and expressed through culture in order for us to find our way forward.
Phoebe Tickell • New Deep Narratives: We Need New Stories of What It Means to Be Human
In-spire: breathing in, breathing out, huffing from the sense that there is more to life than materialism (nihilistic metaphysics), utilitarianism (nihilistic ethics), and small-talk (nihilistic speech).
Zohar Atkins • Lightning: A Manifesto

“If we’re going to change our culture, we have to change our narrative. That’s what it comes down to. We have to change the mental model that our brains are using to make sense of the world.”
—Trabian Shorters, founder of @bmecommunity
Find a link in our bio to listen to Trabian’s full On... See more
instagram.comKrista Tippett x Trabian Shorters
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
Drew Austin • #162: Minimum Viable Self
And the hyper-efficient assembly-line techniques that characterised ‘megalithic’ Hollywood filmmaking from the 1910s onward began to corrode as early as 1948, when an antitrust lawsuit successfully forbade the major studios from owning their own cinemas and crowding them with their own relatively low-cost films.
Ella Dorn • The girls don't know film history
Side eye @ streaming services.