Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Some colleagues I know even speak of an “ethics of weirdness”, something I hope to work on more and that would presumably involve risk, improvisation, nonsense, even magic, not to mention a refusal to retreat before the bizarre, the disturbing, the nonhuman, the unthinkable. To turn and face the strange; to stay with the trouble.
Erik Davis • The Weird and the Banal
Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance.
... See moreSarah Schulman • The Gentrification of the Mind
We’re wired for small, close-knit communities, but instead we’re lost in the chaos of a massive, impersonal society. It’s no wonder we’re struggling—this isn’t the environment we were built for. The cracks are everywhere. Just scroll through social media or read the comments on a political post, and you’ll see it: a storm of anger, hostility, and... See more
Poetic Outlaws • The Comfortable Life Is Killing You
So, is Jacobs right to say that baseball was better when we knew less about it? And here we are at the crux of the issue from another angle: how is the goodness of the game measured and accounted for? Or, more to the point, can the goodness of the game be measured? If not, then in what would the goodness of the game consist? And, an equally... See more
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • The Limits of Optimization
He conducts an ongoing interrogation about what it all means. What’s black culture? What’s hip-hop? What are the responsibilities of a society and the people in it? And his inquiry isn’t bloodlessly academic, either; there’s something very consequential about his approach.