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Saturday, May 12, 2018

The Rise of Creative Classes

Almanac: Newman on ambition and literary style
“He who is ambitious will never write well.” Cardinal Newman, letter to an unnamed student, March 2, 1868 ... read more


Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90% electrek

The would-be artisans who ditch day jobs to chase a dream


The would-be artisans who ditch day jobs to chase a dream
Professionals are risking it all by and pursuing artisanal roles, making chairs, shoes, pottery and gin in a nostalgic bid for simpler times

Jessie Cole: Writing her way out of darkness and tragedy

After tragedy engulfed her family, novelist Jessie Cole started writing as some sort of therapy

I’m not specifically learning to draw right now but I do love how Ralph Ammer builds his lessons. Split into short exercises, the best parts are the animations he draws and integrates in his lessons as gifs. Much lighter and more pleasant to watch than a video, they are very short and looping so you can easily grasp what he’s explaining. Here are a few images from his most recent lesson.
Bryan was in top form, I can’t recall hearing him being more interesting or persuasive.  Here is the audio and text.  We talked about whether any single paper is good enough, the autodidact’s curse, the philosopher who most influenced Bryan, the case against education, the Straussian reading of Bryan, effective altruism, Socrates, Larry David, where to live in 527 A.D., the charm of Richard Wagner, and much more.  Here is one   things that sound good whether or not they actually work very well and not really asking hard questions about whether things that sound good will work out very well in practice. 
I also present what I think are the three strongest arguments against Bryan’s “education is mostly signaling” argument — decide for yourself how good his answers are.
And:
COWEN: …Parenting and schooling in your take don’t matter so much. Something is changing these [norms] that is mostly not parenting and not schooling. And they are changing quite a bit, right?
CAPLAN: Yes.
COWEN: Is it like all technology? Is the secret reading of Bryan Caplan that you’re a technological determinist?
CAPLAN: I don’t think so. In general, not a determinist of any kind.
COWEN: I was teasing about that.
And last but not least:
CAPLAN: …When someone gets angry at Robin, this is what actually outrages me. I just want to say, “Look, to get angry at Robin is like getting angry at baby Jesus.” He’s just a symbol and embodiment of innocence and decency. For someone to get angry at someone who just wants to learn . . .
COWEN: And when they get mad at me?
CAPLAN: Eh, I understand that.


Hail Bryan Caplan!  Again here is the link, and of course you should buy his book The Case Against Education.
Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings’ Guardian. Funny, I despise gambling (pointless and designed to be costly waste of time) and don’t even like card games.
Look at Shakespeare, she will say, at how he leaves room for interpretation, for each actor to take a character and make it their own. That’s what good actors do – work from the details to create a believable persona, to make the watcher believe the character on the stage is true.
She is trying to understand herself, the life she has created …
Via Gabriella Imrich(ova)

When she finished the story in December 1894, Kate Chopin sent it off to The Century, which had published several of her previous submissions. By this time Chopin was a well-known and respected writer, but the story was rejected—almost surely because it dealt with a woman’s adulterous affair. The magazine’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, “felt that fiction should be pleasant and avoid the horrifying, the indelicate, or the immoral,” as Chopin scholar Per Seyersted puts it.

Paul Davis On Crime: Don't Have A Cow: The Simpsons, Laughing At Ourselves And Others

Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship. Pierre Azoulay, MIT and NBER; Benjamin F. Jones, Northwestern University and NBER; J. Daniel Kim, MIT; Javier Miranda, U.S. Census Bureau. March 23, 2018
“Abstract – Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms.
Hey, Bezos! Give Libraries Your Money: The Amazon founder says he doesn’t know what to do with his billions. This writer has an idea.
The Nine Stages of Creativity: Cartoonist Grant Snider illustrates what to expect during the writing process.
Debut author flyposts PRH offices to advertise own book
A debut author flyposted Penguin Random House's offices in London's Vauxhall as part of a guerrilla marketing stunt to promote his new book.





What Groundbreaking Author Alexander Chee Means To Other Writers



Author and cultural commentator Nicole Chung on why Chee’s work resonates so much with her: “Alex said he ‘wanted to plant that flag in the culture,’ and until he said that I don’t know if I’d thought about it as a reason to write. The need to exist in the canon, in the literary world. I found that very powerful, and very brave.”






Encounters With Shakespeare: 15 ‘New Yorker’ Writers On When The Bard Blew Them Away



“On the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death,New Yorker writers” – Elif Batuman, Richard Brody, Larissa MacFarquhar, Vinson Cunningham, Rebecca Mead, Philip Gourevitch, Louis Menand, and others – “share their experiences of reading, watching, studying, performing, memorizing, and falling in love with the work of the Bard.”

When The U.S. Sent Its Jazz Greats Abroad As Weapons In The Cultural Cold War 

"By the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement in the US had become a major international news story. People were horrified by the brutality of Emmett Till's lynching in 1955, and by the mob violence directed at young black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. It undercut  America's claims about freedom and equality. US foreign policy officials decided that America needed to create a new international narrative about its domestic racial struggle." Enter Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and their colleagues. …







Why A Pulitzer-Winning Critic Would Write About Michael Jackson



Margo Jefferson, whose On Michael Jackson is being republished with an updated introduction, explains: “He was the best performer at his peak – an all-encompassing dancing, singing artist in the theatrical tradition of Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, with an acute sense of the mise en scène. He craved omniscient superstar status – a need to top himself with more record sales, bigger audiences, than the last time. By the time I was writing this book, he had become emblematic of complicated dilemmas, cultural obsessions, racial, gender and body metamorphoses.”








Art History Gets The TED-Talks Treatment



“The [Heni Talks] website currently has 25 videos and plans to post new films once every two weeks. Many are presented by high-profile artists and art-world figures such as Damien Hirst, Jeremy Deller and The Art Newspaper‘s new editor, Alison Cole. … The video subjects range from important works such as the Mona Lisa, and the oeuvre of masters such as Cézanne, to art movements like Pop art and Modernism.”










Sam Hamill, Poet And Founder Of Copper Canyon Press, Dies At 74



Hamill also sparked a massive movement of poets against the war with Iraq after being invited to a White House symposium in 2003. “He built a website to present the poems he received, and the White House eventually canceled the symposium. More than 135 poetry readings and other protests were held around the country on Feb. 12, the day the symposium was supposed to begin. More than 13,000 poets submitted work to Mr. Hamill’s website, some of which, including poems by John Balaban, Ursula K. Le Guin and Adrienne Rich, were collected in an anthology, Poets Against the War.“



 Ultimately, to challenge Facebook, Google, and the many unknown players of the data economy, we must devise new business models and structural incentives that aren’t rooted in manipulation and coercion; that don’t depend on the constant surveillance of users, on gathering information on everything they read and purchase, and on building that information into complex dossiers designed to elicit some action — a click, a purchase, a vote. We must move beyond surveillance capitalism and its built-in inequities.








Half Of Theatre Company Board Resigns In Disgust Over Management Issues



Five members of the board of directors of the prominent English touring company Out of Joint “have walked out in reaction to a range of issues, including the way Arts Council England treated the company following the departure of [founding artistic director Max] Stafford-Clark, who was accused of inappropriate behaviour by a number of former colleagues last year. … The members are also understood to have become increasingly unhappy with the way the company was being run by new artistic director Kate Wasserberg and executive producer Martin Derbyshire.”

The Rise Of The Rural Creative Class (Yes, It’s Real)


"A growing body of research shows that innovative businesses are common in rural areas, and rural innovation gets a boost from the arts." Richard Florida digests the data. … [Read More]


The Nobel Prize For Literature May Be Cancelled This Year

Yes, the fallout from the sexual harassment scandal has gotten that bad: "The Swedish Academy yesterday discussed the Nobel prize and came to no decision," said the head of the panel last week. "After our next Thursday meeting there will most probably be a statement on whether we will award a prize this year or reserve it for next year, in which case two prizes for literature will be announced in October 2019." … [Read More]


Review: John Passant’s Songs for the Band Unformed

En Passant — Sunday, May 6, 2018 - 21:22 — Source

 In Independent Australia Sara Moss reviews IA contributor John Passant’s book of poetry, Songs for the Band Unformed, a passionate reflection on politics and love.


Sticky: No


How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible

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