Art crime is as old as art itself. But the FBI's Art Crime Team is fairly new — and busier than ever art crime
It's been 70 years since migrants shaped one of Australia's great engineering feats
The Rape of Britain Sleazy Muslim aristocrats versus a noble commoner.
The Walrus – “For a fee, companies will tackle damaging search results. But is the new economy of digital makeovers making things worse?…Cleaning up your image, however, is not cheap. A serious campaign can cost between $10,000 and $20,000 or more and will usually run for at least four to eight months. Matt Earle’s twenty-four staff members deploy a suite of tactics to dilute or outright remove unwanted content
They have methods for contacting satisfied customers and encouraging them to leave positive reviews to bump up star-rated averages. They are also able to tweak Wikipedia entries in ways that pass muster with the website’s volunteer editors, who can be relentless about deleting puffery. Appeals can be filed to major internet players like Facebook, Google, and Twitter in order to hide a damaging link or critical comments. If it’s an unflattering story in the mainstream press, staff might provide the publication with research that prompts a correction or clarification. If that’s not enough, there’s the nuclear option: disappearing the content entirely…
”The Dirty Work of Cleaning Online Reputations The Walrus
- “Maybe we are so enmeshed in contradictions in our day-to-day lives, so constantly pulled in multiple conflicting directions at once, that we don’t even notice, except when the inconsistency becomes so insistent that it can’t be ignored” — if philosophy is going to makes sense of the world and our lives, argues Zach Weber (Otago), it will be with paraconsistent logics
- “It is a joy to play with this ontological uncertainty. It is the magic of movies” — that we see actors along with their characters and a film’s production along with its fiction is relevant to the metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics of the medium, argues Francey Russell (Barnard)
- The Last Days of Socrates: The Musical — written by the Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani (1998), it’s in Arabic, with over 100 dancers and actors, and it is quite the spectacle
- How does the meaning of a word (or symbol, or gesture…) first arise? — Brian Skyrms (UCI) used simulations as part of his work on this puzzle; now Mike Deigan (Rutgers) has made online versions of these simulations for anyone to run
- “The solace of Platonism is purchased at a large cost. Is there some less evasive and less contorted way to face our end?” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) on disgust, death, and not hating the body
- “The colors, shapes, and other sensible properties entering my experience are all imagined… [but] what’s imagined… is the overall past appearance common to previous encounters with that property” — “perceiving is imagining the past,” argues Michael Barkasi (Toronto)
- “Philosophers should welcome opportunities in academic leadership” — four philosophers with experience as chairs or deans explain why