Faith Hahn

Barry Lyndon is a story which does not depend upon surprise. What is important is not what is going to happen, but how it will happen. I think Thackeray trades off the advantage of surprise to gain a greater sense of inevitability and a better integration of what might otherwise seem melodramatic or contrived. In the scene you refer to where Barry... See more

The way we think about thought is political. This much was evident at the birth of the modern study of the mind, when Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia wrote to René Descartes in 1643 to question his account of cognition. Her self-deprecation will be familiar to any woman who’s dared to dispute with an eminence, and knows that the best way to begin is... See more

It’s tired at this point to say that the weightlessness of postmodern meaning, its confused identifications, ultimately flattens towards fascism. But still, having a viewpoint is perhaps underrated.

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

For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.

Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political... See more

“Attribution shouldn’t start when the song is done — it should start when the model starts learning,” says Sean Power, the company’s cofounder. “We’re trying to quantify creative influence, not just catch copies.”

Grokster and StreamCast are dead. Even the iPod is no longer in production. They are buried and gone, like the Betamax and the Betamax “substantial non-infringing uses” standard — all relics of a bygone era, the ephemera of 2004. Copyright law barely made sense then. As you might suspect, 20 years later, it makes even less sense now.