Sterling Proffer

Some commenters scoffed at the sight of celebrities carping about the work of being famous. But these artists have hardly been lazy or reluctant to play the music business’s games. Each of them is known for elaborate music videos, spectacular stage productions, and otherworldly fashion. They’ve hustled, for all of their careers, to seem larger than... See more

The good news is, you have the freedom to pursue the new opportunities. The bad news is, so does everyone else. The good news is you can do it yourself. The bad news is you have to. Again, it looks easy only in retrospect. It always looks doable, from the perspective of people who have already done it.

The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more