Curation Is King

This theme isn’t just confined to bookstores; it sprawls throughout our urban fabric, notably into the realm of generic coffee shops. Both scenarios – bookshops and coffee shops – underscore a broader trend: our tastes and preferences, once diverse and eclectic, are being molded into a uniform, digitally driven aesthetic.

In this realm, what wins is... See more

What we’re not noticing enough is the fact that algorithms have flattened our cultural landscape and induced a sense of passivity and numbness, challenging our capacity to engage deeply or be genuinely curious.

All of which raises another set of questions, about art rather than morals. Which is a better measure of an artwork, its quality on average or its peaks? How should ambition be weighed against execution, jolting insight against missteps, the good against the bad?

The difference between schools and libraries

From John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (via Austin Kleon):

To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do

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“You have the whole history of all recorded music at your fingertips for no money, and that devalues music in general. It doesn’t properly express the work that goes into it, and it certainly doesn’t express how essential music is to the human experience.”