Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
From New Statesman: Notes on a Scandal.
Clark made it possible for a chap in a pub to appreciate Francis Bacon, and Reich-Ranicki for a hausfrau to persuade her neighbour in the butcher’s queue that Günter Grass was a more important writer than Hermann Hesse. Kenneth Tynan and Pauline Kael added repertoire tips and quality control [...]
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From The American Scholar: Sven Birkerts on Reading in a Digital Age.
I ask my students about their reading habits, and though I’m not surprised to find that few read newspapers or print magazines, many check in with online news sources, aggregate sites, incessantly. They are seldom away from their screens for long, but that’s true [...]
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From the New York Times: I Was a Teenage Illiterate.
At the age of 26, when I returned to New York after an inglorious stab at graduate work in medieval history on the frozen steppes of Chicago, I had a horrifying realization: I was illiterate. At least, I was as close to illiterate as a person [...]
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As pitchers and catchers report in Arizona and Florida, a uniquely American season begins anew. The beauty of the sport of baseball has never been more poetically elegized than by former commissioner Bart Giamatti (you may know his son, Paul) in this essay, “The Green Fields of the Mind.” Play ball!
It breaks [...]
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From The New Republic: The Adults Aren’t Alright.
I’m sorry, but from where I sit, it ain’t the young’uns having notable trouble setting barriers and using technology with any level of discretion, reserve, or common sense. Rather, every time you turn around, an ostensible grown-up has done something monumentally stupid like sexting his mistress, sending filthy [...]
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From The Guardian: Don’t Give Up the Day Job (a UK perspective).
How does the average artist make a living? If you’re Damien Hirst, of course, you need only flog a couple of sharks in formaldehyde; if you’re Tracey Emin, an unmade bed will do. If you’re an actor, a well-publicised turn as Hamlet and near-omnipresence in [...]
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From the New York Times: Why Orwell Endures.
And yet for all his fame and stature, Orwell remains elusive. For one thing, he is impossible to categorize. He was a great something — but a great what? Scarcely a great novelist: the prewar novels are good but not very good, and even “Animal Farm” and “1984” [...]
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A very important blog post about Craigslist and human trafficking from occasional Curator contributor Laura Bramon Good.
I am in Ghana on behalf of a U.S.-based non-governmental organization that partners with Ghanaian anti-trafficking leaders to rescue these children. One of my Ghanaian colleagues is sitting at the helm of the red dugout boat, calling to the [...]
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Guest blog by Curator contributor Rob Hays.
As music fans, we’re often asked to make comparisons and assign labels, often with the purpose of more narrowly defining our tastes and the attendant level of coolness we extract from them. Alterna-folk or lo-fi? Indie-noise or Art school punk? Too much like U2 or not [...]
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From Front Porch Republic: Local Bookstores and the Writers Who Love Them.
That said, the confident positivism of business schools aside, it is in the nature of any historical moment and of any aspect of it to be unpredictable. Has a certain confluence of unanticipated circumstances made it conceivable once more that local bookstores are something [...]
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