Category Archives: Arts

Thought for the Day: 22 December 2014

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Time to end the discussions of The New Republic as cultural phenomenon.  They were okay for a week or so after Foer and Wieseltier got sacked but enough already.   Quit the hand wringing.  Save your mental energy for debating the pieces which get published in it.   Better yet, save your mental energy for reading journals with superior content, e.g., Harper’s, The New Yorker, The American Prospect.

PS  Ta-Nehisi Coates’, The New Republic:  An Appreciation, should have been the end-all for TNR think pieces.

Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day

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The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

– Susan Cooper

Total recall

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A piece in today’s NY Times reminded me of an article in the NYT Magazine and subsequent letter to the editor from nearly 20 years ago.   It was concise and lucid.  (Read the comments section from today’s piece to see why I was reminded.)  I’ll adapt Kaplan’s letter for today’s times:

The 0.1% are part of a culture that values only the act of selling something for more than it was bought. When they and other like them are finished, they will, no doubt, have become more wealthy and more powerful. Yet they will have contributed so very little to the society from which they skim their profits. For all their talent, they offer nothing to the arts, nothing to the sciences and nothing to our shared stock of human ideas.

That’s it in a nutshell.  From my standpoint, the super rich do little more than consume resources and generate huge piles of excrement.  You want to understand my class hostility?  There it is in one paragraph.

PS  Dean Baker addresses Sorkin’s criticism of Sen. Warren here.

PPS A less angry take on compensation disparities and the super rich:  Janna Malamud Smith, Toward A Better America: Readjusting The Value Of Low-Paid, High-Commitment Work.  (I’m not a low-paid worker but I respect people who take on low-paid high-commitment work.)

Honor Labor

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Sept. 1, 2014

Yesterday my daughter asked what I’d be doing at work tomorrow (i.e., today).   I told her I didn’t have to go to work because it’s a holiday, Labor Day.  She asked what Labor Day is.  We’ve talked about Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day as holidays which commemorate the sacrifices others made so that we could live better, safer, freer lives.  Labor Day hadn’t come up before.  I told her that it’s a day where we remember people who stood up for those who work for a living, people who insisted that when you do your job that you be paid fairly for the work you do so that you can pay for your food and the home that you live in – that it’s a day where we remember people who insisted that you not have to put yourself in danger when you go to your work – that it’s a day where we remember people who insisted that you not have to work all day every day in order to keep your job – that you be allowed to take weekends off and have a vacation.  My wife got her a book from the library last week, Brave Girl:  Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909, so maybe at least some of what I said clicked.

I’ll hazard that the vast majority of people reading this post have paid vacation, employer-subsidized health insurance, and go to work in workplaces which are covered by OSHA safety standards.  We’re pretty damn fortunate to have those things.  We should take a moment today to think of the people who helped make things like 40 hour workweeks, paid vacation, and workplace safety standards a reality.  We should also take a moment to think of the people who are committed to seeing that those things are there for everyone who works for a living, not just the upper-middle class.   Finally, we should also take moment to think of those for whom 40 hour workweeks, paid vacation, and workplace safety standards aren’t in the cards.

With that, Shirt by Robert Pinsky: Continue reading →

Astra Taylor on the Internet and “cultural democracy”

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The lead-in to Rose Dwyer’s interview with Astra Taylor on the Harper’s magazine website:

In her new book, The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource. I asked her six questions about her book…

Read the full interview here.