Faith Hahn

The Keatsian endeavor has never been popular, but is particularly unfashionable today. Religious fundamentalists reject it on the grounds that revelation and commitment are needed to orient oneself in the world. The amorality of a poet who is a “thoroughfare for all thoughts” risks heresy or destabilization. Tell me where you stand, where your... See more

Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. While previous... See more

“As humans we are involved in a dance with things that cannot be stopped, since we are only human through things,” says Hodder. We will continue to perform lifestyles made possible by the Internet whether individual social media platforms survive or not, and even, especially, if we log off for good. Social media altered the world in the same way... See more

An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get... See more

In 1926, the year before The Jazz Singer popularized pre-recorded sound to cinema, theater pits employed 22,000 musicians in the United States; by 1934, there were only 4,100. Fewer musicians’ salaries meant lower ticket prices and more daily showings, and attendance almost doubled. New York City’s Local 802 organized picket lines outside theaters... See more

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.

One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include... See more