culture

In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major... See more

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

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.

But this isn’t about phone numbers or navigation. It’s about how technology clearly changes our minds. And there is a risk that today’s siphoning of young brains into phones and laptops isn’t just happening with maps and digits, but with critical thinking and complex language.

There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break,... See more