For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
New technologies may be disruptive to the existing population of working musicians, but even more irresistible to the general public than new technology are new forms of music, which may introduce new classes of musicians who don’t fit neatly into the existing professional categories. Take the rise of rock and roll.
What do they say? Nothing at all. Life goes on. In the morning, adults hurry to work; children go to school; grandmothers go stand in lines. More and more frequently, a family member is taken away, now a friend from work, now a neighbor. That’s life. Only the residents of houses next door to the temple seem to take an interest. In spare moments,... See more
Through linguistic offshoots, such as writing, we are able to practice a unique phenomenon: exbodiment , in which byproducts of our cognition can be captured, stored, shared, and passed through generations.
But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden’s claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers... See more
The crowd is the flâneur’s indispensable counterpart: the crowd turns people into observable objects . In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man in the Crowd’ the protagonist pursues an intriguing figure through the streets of London for a whole night without ever being able to see his face: in big cities, one can stroll through busy streets without... See more