culture
Lana, Taylor and anti-institutional realignment
Recently, I watched the Grammys and learned more about Lana Del Rey. I had no idea she was friendly with Taylor Swift, or that she and Taylor shared the same producer. These women have been pop stars for over a decade: Taylor the establishment good girl; Lana, the anti-establishment shock and awe... See more
Recently, I watched the Grammys and learned more about Lana Del Rey. I had no idea she was friendly with Taylor Swift, or that she and Taylor shared the same producer. These women have been pop stars for over a decade: Taylor the establishment good girl; Lana, the anti-establishment shock and awe... See more
Katherine Boyle • Tweet
Girard believes that this concept permeates every aspect of society. “Enlightenment concepts of the individual persist all the way into existentialist thought,” he argues. In espousing equality between all men, the Enlightenment propagated the belief that the individual should not be subsumed to another. Indeed, the individual should not be... See more
Leo Nasskau • René Girard, mimetic desire, and society's biggest rat race
The prestige recession
ystrickler.com
Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else.
At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It’s beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn’t happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.
How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain,... See more
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

An idea is an idea until it’s executed on
Tha Hunt
apps.apple.comBut this Google trial? By far the most important moment was when Judge Mehta denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial for fear that information Google wishes wouldn’t be disclosed become public. Indeed, Google lawyers have explicitly argued that the judge should avoid allowing documents to become public... See more
