Skip to main content

Home/ New Culture Library/ Group items matching "art" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
1More

Lady Psychopaths Welcome - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-lady-psychopaths-welcome.html society psychology sexuality psychopaths
shared by James Goodman on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 13 Oct 14
     
    "Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids." Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative - wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague - I'll take the former. If "Gone Girl" is sending the wrong message about women, then Emma Bovary should have gone to medical school instead of cheating on her husband, Anna Karenina should have been a train engineer rather than throwing herself onto the tracks, and Eve Harrington should have waited her turn. The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all of womanhood, is an enemy of art - not to mention wickedly delicious Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people's prior ideological assumptions. art says "Think," not "You're right."
4More

Monoculture - 0 views

kk.org/...5871 social reading society politics economy
shared by James Goodman on 04 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Years back, in CS Lewis’ essay ‘On The Reading of Old Books,’ I encountered a suggestion that has stuck with me ever since. Lewis posited that each generation of humanity takes certain things for granted: assumptions that go unexamined and unquestioned because they are commonly held by all. It was Lewis’ opinion that reading books written by prior generations would help us to see around these generational blind spots.
  • In her new book, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything, FS Michaels suggests that just such a blind spot has, over the course of generations, come to dominate the narrative and values that our society lives by. From education and the arts to how we eat, think, and play, Michaels asserts that we have been steeped in a single point of view, the economic, where value is reduced to what can be sold and worth is determined by financial expediency. Michael’s writing is clear and sharp as she brings the impact of this pervasive global philosophy down to the personal level, showing how it affects our lives in the everyday.
  • In a time of seemingly constant budget cuts and belt-tightening, this book is a valuable tool in provoking thought and discussion about how we as a society value the arts, education, and health.
  • James Goodman on 04 Jul 12
     
    In her new book, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything, FS Michaels suggests that just such a blind spot has, over the course of generations, come to dominate the narrative and values that our society lives by. From education and the arts to how we eat, think, and play, Michaels asserts that we have been steeped in a single point of view, the economic, where value is reduced to what can be sold and worth is determined by financial expediency. Michael's writing is clear and sharp as she brings the impact of this pervasive global philosophy down to the personal level, showing how it affects our lives in the everyday.
1More

At a Do-It-Yourself Salon in Brooklyn, Books Obscure and Arcane - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-books-obscure-and-arcane.html books brooklyn society
shared by James Goodman on 20 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 20 Apr 13
     
    "While many libraries are, of course, still run by municipalities or schools, it has become more common for people to create their own, many of them, like Mellow Pages, seeking to include material that is unusual or that is curated with a particular audience in mind. For instance, ABC No Rio, a community and cultural center on the Lower East Side, maintains a zine library. And a group of librarians who joined the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York created a library at Zuccotti Park. Mellow Pages occupies a 200-square-foot room in a former industrial building on Bogart Street in Bushwick that Mr. Perkins had been using as an art studio. In addition to books, it is furnished with scavenged furniture, a guitar, a bottle of Wild Turkey and an ever-percolating coffeepot. About 60 people have joined since the library opened, and it has been the site of readings by some of the writers who are included in the collection. "
2More

New Statesman - An interview with Sam Harris - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...science-moral-torture-human religion atheism science logic rationalism
shared by James Goodman on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • guess the reason you think that is that for you, despite what certain secularists might say, religion involves making factual claims about the nature of reality.Yeah - I just think that's indisputable, apart from the fact that you can get many people who claim to be religious, but when you push, they are then loath to make any claims about what they actually believe. So there are many believers who are attached to the culture; they're attached to the buildings; they're attached to the art, they want to meet with that particular group - and yet they spend almost no time at all thinking about what, if anything, is true, in the doctrine. That, I would argue is just not really religion. Every religion contains propositional claims about certain events that happen in history, certain events that will happen in the future.
  • One reply to that might be to say that that's simply a stipulative definition.Well, there's no other honest reading of the books. Religion may be too broad a category, but if you take what religion means in the West - Judaism, Christianity or Islam - we're talking about some books. The only reason anyone can wake up in the morning thinking that Jesus even existed is because we have the New Testament, right? So you look at the New Testament. It makes a variety of claims that are by definition at odds with what we know to be scientifically plausible. And if you're going to make the move of saying "well, none of these are really claims, this is just a story, this is just literature," then you're reading the New Testament the way we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then you have no religion of Christianity; you have, at best, mythology. You have art - which is what I think you should have; this is how we should read these books. And certainly some parts of the Bible should qualify as great literature.
3More

Bold New York bookworms strip down for Topless Pulp Fiction Club  - NY Daily ... - 0 views

www.nydailynews.com/...fiction-club-article-1.1340864 topless new york politics sexuality health society
shared by James Goodman on 11 May 13 - No Cached
  • The Topless Pulp Fiction Club is a small group of young women who have taken to gathering in city parks to read their favorite works of fiction sans brassierre.
  • There are many ways to read a book. One of them is to do so topless. That, at least, is the premise behind the Topless Pulp Fiction Club, a small group of young women who have taken to gathering in city parks to read their favorite works of fiction sans brassierre or any other covering.
  • James Goodman on 11 May 13
     
    "There are many ways to read a book. One of them is to do so topless. That, at least, is the premise behind the Topless Pulp Fiction Club, a small group of young women who have taken to gathering in city parks to read their favorite works of fiction sans brassierre or any other covering."
5More

The Better Angels of Our Nature - By Steven Pinker - Book Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...steven-pinker-book-review.html society psychology science
shared by James Goodman on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Why Violence Has Declined
  • The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.
  • Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th —­ deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “pacification process.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It’s not only deaths in war, but murder, too, that is declining over the long term. Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as especially “gentle,” like the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit, turn out to have murder rates that are, relative to population, comparable to those of Detroit. In Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been if you had lived 500 years ago. American rates, too, have fallen steeply over the past two or three centuries. Pinker sees this decline as part of the “civilizing process,” a term he borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce. (Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that at least part of the reason for the regional differences in American homicide rates is that people in the South are less likely to accept the state’s monopoly on force. Instead, a tradition of self-help justice and a “culture of honor” sanctions retaliation when one is insulted or mistreated. Statistics bear this out — the higher homicide rate in the South is due to quarrels that turn lethal, not to more killings during armed robberies — and experiments show that even today Southerners respond more strongly to insults than Northerners.)
  • The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20▼ items per page