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Javier E

(1) A Brief History of Media and Audiences and Twitter and The Bulwark - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...history-of-media-and-audiences

writer media institutions audience access success gatekeepers twitter history social media

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • In the old days—and here I mean even as recently as 2000 or 2004—audiences were built around media institutions. The New York Times had an audience. The New Yorker had an audience. The Weekly Standard had an audience.
  • If you were a writer, you got access to these audiences by contributing to the institutions. No one cared if you, John Smith, wrote a piece about Al Gore. But if your piece about Al Gore appeared in Washington Monthly, then suddenly you had an audience.
  • There were a handful of star writers for whom this wasn’t true: Maureen Dowd, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion. Readers would follow these stars wherever they appeared. But they were the exceptions to the rule. And the only way to ascend to such exalted status was by writing a lot of great pieces for established institutions and slowly assembling your audience from theirs.
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  • The internet stripped institutions of their gatekeeping powers, thus making it possible for anyone to publish—and making it inevitable that many writers would create audiences independent of media institutions.
  • The internet destroyed the apprenticeship system that had dominated American journalism for generations. Under the old system, an aspiring writer took a low-level job at a media institution and worked her way up the ladder until she was trusted enough to write.
  • Under the new system, people started their careers writing outside of institutions—on personal blogs—and then were hired by institutions on the strength of their work.
  • In practice, these outsiders were primarily hired not on the merits of their work, but because of the size of their audience.
  • what it really did was transform the nature of audiences. Once the internet existed it became inevitable that institutions would see their power to hold audiences wane while individual writers would have their power to build personal audiences explode.
  • this meant that institutions would begin to hire based on the size of a writer’s audience. Which meant that writers’ overriding professional imperative was to build an audience, since that was the key to advancement.
  • Twitter killed the blog and lowered the barrier to entry for new writers from “Must have a laptop, the ability to navigate WordPress, and the capacity to write paragraphs” to “Do you have an iPhone and the ability to string 20 words together? With or without punctuation?”
  • If you were able to build a big enough audience on Twitter, then media institutions fell all over themselves trying to hire you—because they believed that you would then bring your audience to them.2
  • If you were a writer for the Washington Post, or Wired, or the Saginaw Express, you had to build your own audience not to advance, but to avoid being replaced.
  • For journalists, audience wasn’t just status—it was professional capital. In fact, it was the most valuable professional capital.
  • Everything we just talked about was driven by the advertising model of media, which prized pageviews and unique users above all else. About a decade ago, that model started to fray around the edges,3 which caused a shift to the subscription model.
  • Today, if you’re a subscription publication, what Twitter gives you is growth opportunity. Twitter’s not the only channel for growth—there are lots of others, from TikTok to LinkedIn to YouTube to podcasts to search. But it’s an important one.
  • Twitter’s attack on Substack was an attack on the subscription model of journalism itself.
  • since media has already seen the ad-based model fall apart, it’s not clear what the alternative will be if the subscription model dies, too.
  • All of which is why having a major social media platform run by a capricious bad actor is suboptimal.
  • And why I think anyone else who’s concerned about the future of media ought to start hedging against Twitter. None of the direct hedges—Post, Mastodon, etc.—are viable yet. But tech history shows that these shifts can happen fairly quickly.
Javier E

The Joy of Psyching Myself Out­ - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oy-of-psyching-myself-out.html

science psychology language writing objectivity

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • that neat separation is not just unwarranted; it’s destructive
  • Although it’s often presented as a dichotomy (the apparent subjectivity of the writer versus the seeming objectivity of the psychologist), it need not be.
  • IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?
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  • “A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”
  • At the turn of the century, psychology was a field quite unlike what it is now. The theoretical musings of William James were the norm (a wry commenter once noted that William James was the writer, and his brother Henry, the psychologist)
  • Freud was a breed of psychologist that hardly exists anymore: someone who saw the world as both writer and psychologist, and for whom there was no conflict between the two. That boundary melding allowed him to posit the existence of cognitive mechanisms that wouldn’t be empirically proved for decades,
  • Freud got it brilliantly right and brilliantly wrong. The rightness is as good a justification as any of the benefits, the necessity even, of knowing how to look through the eyes of a writer. The wrongness is part of the reason that the distinction between writing and experimental psychology has grown far more rigid than it was a century ago.
  • the signs people associate with liars often have little empirical evidence to support them. Therein lies the psychologist’s distinct role and her necessity. As a writer, you look in order to describe, but you remain free to use that description however you see fit. As a psychologist, you look to describe, yes, but also to verify.
  • Without verification, we can’t always trust what we see — or rather, what we think we see.
  • The desire for the world to be what it ought to be and not what it is permeates experimental psychology as much as writing, though. There’s experimental bias and the problem known in the field as “demand characteristics” — when researchers end up finding what they want to find by cuing participants to act a certain way.
  • IN 1932, when he was in his 70s, Freud gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis. In his final talk, “A Philosophy of Life,” he focused on clarifying an important caveat to his research: His followers should not be confused by the seemingly internal, and thus possibly subjective, nature of his work. “There is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations,” he said.
  • That is what both the psychologist and the writer should strive for: a self-knowledge that allows you to look in order to discover, without agenda, without preconception, without knowing or caring if what you’re seeing is wrong or right in your scheme of the world. It’s harder than it sounds. For one thing, you have to possess the self-knowledge that will allow you to admit when you’re wrong.
  • Even with the best intentions, objectivity can prove a difficult companion. I left psychology behind because I found its structural demands overly hampering. I couldn’t just pursue interesting lines of inquiry; I had to devise a set of experiments, see how feasible they were, both technically and financially, consider how they would reflect on my career. That meant that most new inquiries never happened — in a sense, it meant that objectivity was more an ideal than a reality. Each study was selected for a reason other than intrinsic interest.
Javier E

Writing, Typing, and Economics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...305165

writing economics advice knowledge language Bias

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The first lesson would have to do with the all-important issue of inspiration. All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand — are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion.
  • And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.
  • Writers, in contrast, do nothing because they are waiting for inspiration.In my own case there are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. However, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed before, as I've often said, I put in that note of spontaneity which even my meanest critics concede
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  • It helps greatly in the avoidance of work to be in the company of others who are also waiting for the golden moment. The best place to write is by yourself, because writing becomes an escape from the terrible boredom of your own personality. It's the reason that for years I've favored Switzerland, where I look at the telephone and yearn to hear it ring.
  • There may be inspired writers for whom the first draft is just right. But anyone who is not certifiably a Milton had better assume that the first draft is a very primitive thing. The reason is simple: Writing is difficult work. Ralph Paine, who managed Fortune in my time, used to say that anyone who said writing was easy was either a bad writer or an unregenerate liar
  • Thinking, as Voltaire avowed, is also a very tedious thing which men—or women—will do anything to avoid. So all first drafts are deeply flawed by the need to combine composition with thought. Each later draft is less demanding in this regard. Hence the writing can be better
  • There does come a time when revision is for the sake of change—when one has become so bored with the words that anything that is different looks better. But even then it may be better.
  • the lesson of Harry Luce. No one who worked for him ever again escaped the feeling that he was there looking over one's shoulder. In his hand was a pencil; down on each page one could expect, any moment, a long swishing wiggle accompanied by the comment: "This can go." Invariably it could. It was written to please the author and not the reader. Or to fill in the space. The gains from brevity are obvious; in most efforts to achieve brevity, it is the worst and dullest that goes. It is the worst and dullest that spoils the rest.
  • Economics is an example, and within the field of economics the subject of money, with the history of which I have been much concerned, is an especially good case. Any specialist who ventures to write on money with a view to making himself intelligible works under a grave moral hazard. He will be accused of oversimplification. The charge will be made by his fellow professionals, however obtuse or incompetent
  • Reluctantly, but from a long and terrible experience, I would urge my young writers to avoid all attempts at humor
  • Only a very foolish man will use a form of language that is wholly uncertain in its effect. That is the nature of humor
  • Finally, I would come to a matter of much personal interest, intensely self-serving. It concerns the peculiar pitfalls of the writer who is dealing with presumptively difficult or technical matters
  • as he grew older, he became less and less interested in theory, more and more interested in information.
  • In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot be stated in plain language
  • Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought
  • It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought
Javier E

The Right to Write - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-right-to-write

writing empathy

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • He was driven, not by a narcissistic urge for literary gain, but by deep empathy for his sister. His response was not, “I can use this,” but “I can’t bear this.” Writing was a way to relieve his own pain. This was a deeply compassionate response.
  • Empathy is the opposite of exploitation. It’s empathy that allows a writer to feel her way into someone else’s experience. A great writer like Tolstoy will feel a character’s life as his own; he’ll enter fully into that consciousness, and his responses will reverberate through his work. A great writer will use a narrative because she finds it moving, or compelling, troubling or heartbreaking or exhilarating. What drives her is empathy, not voyeurism.
  • Writers are trying to reach some understanding of the world, and we do this by setting down stories. We draw on our own experience, but, since that includes everything we encounter, this means drawing on others’ stories as well.
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  • A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.
kushnerha

The Joy of Psyching Myself Out­ - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oy-of-psyching-myself-out.html

new york times perception cognitive bias

shared by kushnerha on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?
  • “A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”Chekhov’s chemist is a naturalist — someone who sees reality for what it is, rather than what it should be. In that sense, the starting point of the psychologist and the writer is the same: a curiosity that leads you to observe life in all its dimensions.
  • Without verification, we can’t always trust what we see — or rather, what we think we see. Whether we’re psychologists or writers (or anything else), our eyes are never the impartial eyes of Chekhov’s chemist. Our expectations, our wants and shoulds, get in the way. Take, once again, lying. Why do we think we know how liars behave? Liars should divert their eyes. They should feel ashamed and guilty and show the signs of discomfort that such feelings engender. And because they should, we think they do.
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  • The desire for the world to be what it ought to be and not what it is permeates experimental psychology as much as writing, though. There’s experimental bias and the problem known in the field as “demand characteristics” — when researchers end up finding what they want to find by cuing participants to act a certain way. It’s also visible when psychologists choose to study one thing rather than another, dismiss evidence that doesn’t mesh with their worldview while embracing that which does. The subjectivity we tend to associate with the writerly way of looking may simply be more visible in that realm rather than exclusive to it.
  • “There is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations,” he said.
  • Intuition and inspiration, he went on, “can safely be counted as illusions, as fulfillments of wishes.” They are not to be relied on as evidence of any sort. “Science takes account of the fact that the mind of man creates such demands and is ready to trace their source, but it has not the slightest ground for thinking them justified.”
  • That is what both the psychologist and the writer should strive for: a self-knowledge that allows you to look in order to discover, without agenda, without preconception, without knowing or caring if what you’re seeing is wrong or right in your scheme of the world. It’s harder than it sounds. For one thing, you have to possess the self-knowledge that will allow you to admit when you’re wrong.
  • most new inquiries never happened — in a sense, it meant that objectivity was more an ideal than a reality. Each study was selected for a reason other than intrinsic interest.
  • Isolation precludes objectivity. It’s in the merging not simply of ways of seeing but also of modes of thought that a truly whole perception of reality may eventually emerge. Or at least that way we can realize its ultimate impossibility — and that’s not nothing, either.
Javier E

Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-is-fine-with-all-of-it.html

privacy writer silence

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • If you’re in a state of perpetual fear of losing market share for you as a person, it’s just the wrong mind-set to move through the world with.” Meaning that if your goal is to get liked and retweeted, then you are perhaps molding yourself into the kind of person you believe will get those things, whether or not that person resembles the actual you. The writer’s job is to say things that are uncomfortable and hard to reduce. Why would a writer mold himself into a product?
  • And why couldn’t people hear him about the social effects this would have? “The internet is all about destroying the elite, destroying the gatekeepers,” he said. “The people know best. You take that to its conclusion, and you get Donald Trump. What do those Washington insiders know? What does the elite know?
  • So he decided to withdraw from it all. After publicity for “The Corrections” ended, he decided he would no longer read about himself — not reviews, not think pieces, not stories, and then, as they came, not status updates and not tweets. He didn’t want to hear reaction to his work. He didn’t want to see the myriad ways he was being misunderstood. He didn’t want to know what the hashtags were.
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  • I stopped reading reviews because I noticed all I remember is the negatives. Whatever fleeting pleasure you have in someone applying a laudatory adjective to your book is totally washed away by the unpleasantness of remembering the negative things for the rest of your life verbatim.
  • Franzen thinks that there’s no way for a writer to do good work — to write something that can be called “consuming and extraordinarily moving” — without putting a fence around yourself so that you can control the input you encounter. So that you could have a thought that isn’t subject to pushback all the time from anyone who has ever met you or heard of you or expressed interest in hearing from you. Without allowing yourself to think for a minute.
  • It’s not just writers. It’s everyone. The writer is just an extreme case of something everyone struggles with. “On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself and your abilities and summon enormous confidence from somewhere. On the other hand, to write well, or just to be a good person, you need to be able to doubt yourself — to entertain the possibility that you’re wrong about everything, that you don’t know everything, and to have sympathy with people whose lives and beliefs and perspectives are very different from yours.”
  • “This balancing act” — the confidence that you know everything plus the ability to believe that you don’t — “only works, or works best, if you reserve a private space for it.”
  • Can you write clearly about something that you don’t yourself swim in? Don’t you have to endure it and hate it most of the time like the rest of us?
  • his answer was no. No. No, you absolutely don’t. You can miss a meme, and nothing really changes. You can be called fragile, and you will live. “I’m pretty much the opposite of fragile. I don’t need internet engagement to make me vulnerable. Real writing makes me — makes anyone doing it — vulnerable.”
  • Has anyone considered that the interaction is the fragility? Has anyone considered that letting other people define how you fill your day and what they fill your head with — a passive, postmodern stream of other people’s thoughts — is the fragility?
anonymous

Creator of 'All Rise' on CBS Is Fired After Writers' Complaints - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...se-greg-spottiswood-fired.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Creator of ‘All Rise’ on CBS Is Fired After Writers’ Complaints
  • Greg Spottiswood had faced numerous complaints over the way issues of race and gender were addressed on the show, a rare prime-time CBS drama with a Black woman as a protagonist.
  • Warner Bros. Television has fired the showrunner and creator of the CBS show “All Rise,” Greg Spottiswood, after a second investigation into allegations regarding how he dealt with the show’s writers, including in conversations involving race.
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  • “We remain committed, at all times, to providing a safe and inclusive working environment on our productions and for all employees.”
  • Mr. Spottiswood had previously been investigated for his treatment of the writing staff during the first season of the CBS procedural
  • “All Rise” has been celebrated by CBS after its prime-time lineup had been criticized for its lack of diversity
  • Five of the original seven members of the “All Rise” writing staff left the show because of his treatment of them and the way the show, under his direction, depicted race and gender,
  • “We had to do so much behind the scenes to keep these scripts from being racist and offensive,”
  • Mr. Spottiswood said he was aware of the problems with his leadership and pledged to do better.
  • The studio kept Mr. Spottiswood, who is white, in charge of the show, and provided him a corporate coach to advise him.
  • claiming he was interested only in having Mr. Nayar appear at public events with the title of executive producer but did not give him the duties to match that position.
  • The most recent investigation was again focused on statements Mr. Spottiswood was said to have made in the writers’ room.
Javier E

Illustrating With Words Alone « The Dish - 1 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...lustrating-through-words-alone

illustration writing

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Sam Sacks details the turn against illustrated stories and novels among early 20th century writers, including Henry James and Virginia Woolf, who were suspicious of what visuals did to the integrity of their art:
  • So writers somewhat defensively cleaved to this division: pictures were about superficial titillation; prose was about essences. And over time the opinion hardened that the old custom of accompanying illustration was a form of aesthetic corruption.
  • Writers who stick to this dichotomy are missing out, especially in the age of e-readers that “allow you to read text, look at pictures, and watch videos on the same device.”
missy duncan

Expert Writers Center | Best Online-based Writing Company - 0 views

www.expertwriterscenter.com

writer online academic writers expert research papers essay

shared by missy duncan on 17 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • missy duncan on 17 Jan 18
     
    The best online based writing company. Helpful in meeting any student's writing needs.
Javier E

Harold Bloom Is Dead. But His 'Rage for Reading' Is Undiminished. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...book-of-life-harold-bloom.html

books classics reading critic language knowledge education literature

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It’s a series of meditations on what Bloom believes to be the most important novels we have, and it takes for granted that its readers already know the books under consideration; in other words, that they have already absorbed “the canon,” and are eager to reconsider it later in their lives.
  • A not atypical, almost throwaway passage for you to test the waters on: “Tolstoy, as befits the writer since Shakespeare who most has the art of the actual, combines in his representational praxis the incompatible powers of Homer and the Yahwist.” This is not Bloom showing off; it’s the way Bloom thinks and proceeds.
  • Apart from his novelists, his frame of reference rests on Shakespeare above all others, Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Emerson, Dr. Johnson (the “shrewdest of all literary critics”), Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman (for him, the central American writer of the 19th century), Wallace Stevens, Freud
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  • Among the novelists, Cervantes, Tolstoy (supreme), Melville, Austen, Proust, Joyce.
  • He is inevitably at his strongest when dealing with those writers he cares most about. With Jane Austen, for one. And, above all, with Tolstoy:
  • As for Dickens, whose “David Copperfield” was a direct influence on Tolstoy, to Bloom his greatest achievement is “Bleak House”
  • He pairs it with Dickens’s final complete novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” a book I care for so extravagantly that I’ve read it three times
  • The two works in which Bloom is most fully invested are “Moby-Dick” (40 pages) and “Ulysses” (54)
  • He chooses to give room to not one but two of Le Guin’s novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed,”
Javier E

Why authors are turning down lucrative deals in favour of Substack | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...stack-salman-rushdie-dc-marvel

media subscription business model writers writing language social media technology

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Lulu Cheng Meservey from Substack says the company calls this a “pro deal”, with advances on a sliding scale depending on a writer’s profile. She says: “We do have several authors in our sights who are currently traditionally published, and are proactively approaching writers we think would do well at Substack. Over the next couple of years you will see some very recognisable names.”
  • On his blog, Tynion wrote: “DC had presented me with a three-year renewal of my exclusive contract, with the intent of me working on Batman for the bulk of that time … And then I received another contract. The best I’ve ever been given in a decade as a professional comic book writer. A grant from Substack to create a new slate of original comic book properties directly on their platform, that my co-creators and I would own completely, with Substack taking none of the intellectual property rights, or even the publishing rights.”
  • The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee
Javier E

Rebecca F Kuang rejects idea authors should not write about other races | Publishing | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ld-not-write-about-other-races

publishing identity writing culture appropriation

shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • The author of Babel and The Poppy War, Rebecca F Kuang, has said she finds the idea that authors should only write about characters of their own race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”.
  • the author, who was born in China but moved to the US when she was four, said that there is a “really weird kind of identity politics going on in American publishing”. She is “sympathetic” to an extent, as it is coming from “decades of frustration of seeing the same racist, uncritical, under-researched, shallow stereotypes”
  • The problem is, Kuang thinks, is that this has now “spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race”. As a result, a movement that began as a call for more authentic stories about marginalised communities “gets flipped around and weaponised against the marginalised writers to pigeonhole them into telling only certain kinds of stories”.
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  • Kuang was critical of those who believe that “the only people getting book deals right now are BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of colour] writers”, including Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted last year that editors do not want to look at debuts by white male writers. Oates “really just needs to get off Twitter”, Kuang joked, but also said “if you just walk into a bookstore you know that’s not true.”
  • “We also know from industry reports year after year that the number of BIPOC authors being published hasn’t really budged since the 70s”, she added. “In fact, you can historically trace the years in which the number of Black authors being published in the US spiked to the years in which Toni Morrison was an acquiring editor, which is very depressing.
Javier E

Dispute Within Art Critics Group Over Diversity Reveals a Widening Rift - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-aica-rift-diversity-jobs.html

art criticism diversity history crisis culture economics analysis outlook

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)
  • Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.
  • The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.
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  • “It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”
  • According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.
  • Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.
  • “It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”
  • Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.
  • David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”
  • While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.
  • In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.
  • The need for change in museums was pointed out in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, published by Artnet News in December, that analyzed more than a decade of data from over 30 cultural institutions. It found that just 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were by female artists and only 2.2 percent were by Black American artists
  • (National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )
  • Julia Halperin, one of the study’s organizers, who recently left her position as Artnet’s executive editor, said that the industry has an asymmetric approach to diversity. “The pool of artists is diversifying somewhat, but the pool of staff critics has not,” she said.
  • the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
Javier E

How GOP Leaders Must Manage Their Political Lives in the Era of Donald Trump - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...483354

politics politician compromise hypocrisy

shared by Javier E on 19 May 16 - No Cached
  • The day-in, day-out work of the politician is the management of electoral coalitions: coaxing, cajoling, compelling people to work together who—in the more natural course of things—might have nothing in common
  • Unlike writers and intellectuals, politicians don’t have the freedom to work only with people they like and admire. Unlike writers and intellectuals, they have no duty to speak aloud their inner convictions—their work would become impossible if they did.
  • Politics unfortunately abounds in shams that must be treated reverentially for every politician who would succeed. If you are the sort of man whose stomach revolts against treating shams reverentially, you will be well advised to stay out of politics altogether and set up as a prophet; your prophecies may perhaps sow good seed for some future harvest. But as a politician you would be impotent. For at any given time the bulk of your countrymen believe firmly and devoutly, not only in various things that are worthy of belief, but also in illusions of one kind and another; and they will never submit to have their affairs managed for them by one who appears not to share in their credulity.
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  • More F.S. Oliver: Nothing in politics is sadder than: the man of sterling character whose genius is so antipathetic to the particular emergency in which he finds himself as to stupefy his thoughts and paralyze his actions. He drifts to disaster, grappling blindfolded which are beyond his comprehension, failing without really fighting.
  • Bad choices over the past decade by Republican political leaders opened the way to Donald Trump, yes.  For a decade, Republican voters have signaled they wanted to protect Medicare, cut immigration, fight fewer wars, and nominate no more Bushes. Their party leaders interpreted those signals as demands to cut Medicare, increase immigration, put boots on the ground in Syria, and nominate another Bush.
  • Their task ahead, in the Biblical phrase, is to pluck the brands from the fire—rescue as much of their party as can be rescued—while simultaneously minimizing the damage to party and country by the nominee their rank-and-file has imposed on them. They need to maneuver so that Trump’s defeat is as solitary as possible, and so that he cannot shift the blame for the failure he has earned onto the heads of others
  • Trump’s taught Republican politicians that they’ve neglected the interests and values of their core supporters. He’s demonstrated that much of their party ideology is obsolete, and that their language no longer moves their voters. He’s proven that their party is less culturally conservative than they believed, less hostile to social insurance than they imagined, and more worried about the economic and social costs of mass migration than they realized. Those are valuable lessons that need to be absorbed and pondered.
  • He’s also demonstrated that he himself is a dangerous person
  • To save themselves and their country, Republican politicians will have to rediscover the politician’s arts of deftness, flexibility, and self-preservation—while stealthily hastening Trump toward the defeat that almost certainly awaits him in November.
  • That’s a big job and a hard job, all the harder because they cannot acknowledge what they are doing. They will seem to help Trump win, while actually working to ensure he fail
  • What Walter Lippman said of presidents is really true of all politicians: They are not “working through noble institutions to dear ends … but trying to grind out a few crude results from a decadent political machine.”
  • The harms they stop are more important than the good they cannot achieve. What they’re called upon to do is to practice statesmanship without fine phrases; to protect the republic without receiving any credit for it
Javier E

Facebook will start telling you when a story may be fake - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...g-you-when-a-story-may-be-fake

facebook fake news culture

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.
  • Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.
  • The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.
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  • Users will also be able to report potentially false stories to Facebook or send messages directly to the person posting a questionable article.
  • The company is focusing, for now, on what Mosseri called the “bottom of the barrel” websites that are purposefully set up to deceive and spread fake news, as well as those that are impersonating other news organizations. “We are not looking to flag legitimate organizations,” Mosseri said. “We’re looking for pages posing as legitimate organizations.” Articles from legitimate sites that are controversial or even wrong should not get flagged, he said.
  • The company will also prioritize checking stories that are getting lots of flags from users and are being shared widely, to go after the biggest targets possible.
  • "From a journalistic side, is it enough? It’s a little late.”
  • Facebook is fine to filter out other content -- such as pornography -- for which the definition is unclear. There's no clear explanation for why Facebook hasn't decided to apply similar filters to fake news. “I think that’s a little weak,” Tu said. “If you recognize that it’s bad and journalists at the AP say it’s bad, you shouldn’t have it on your site.”
  • Others said Facebook's careful approach may be warranted. "I think we'll have to wait and see early results to determine how effective the strategy is," said Alexios Mantzarlis, of Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network. "In my eyes, erring on the side of caution is not a bad idea with something so complicated," he said
  • Facebook is also trying to crack down on people who have made a business in fake news by tweaking the social network's advertising practices. Any article that has been disputed, for example, cannot be used in an ad. Facebook is also playing around with ways to limit links from publishers with landing pages that are mostly ads — a common tactic for fake-news websites
  • With those measures in place, “we’re hoping financially motivated spammers might move away from fake news,” Mosseri said
  • Paul Horner, a fake news writer who makes a living writing viral hoaxes, said he wasn't immediately worried about Facebook's new crackdown on fake news sites. "It's really easy to start a new site. I have 50 domain names. I have a dedicated server. I can start up a new site within 48 hours," he said, shortly after Facebook announced its new anti-hoax programs.  If his sites, which he describes as "satire"-focused, do end up getting hit too hard, Horner says he has "backup plans."
Javier E

Don't Write What You Know | Tin House - 0 views

www.tinhouse.com/...nston-writers-notebook-ii.html

literature reality realism representation truth

shared by Javier E on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • I don’t know the origin of the “Write What You Know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.”
  • part of me dies inside when a student whose story has been critiqued responds to the workshop by saying, “You can’t object to the _________ scene. It really happened! I was there!” The writer is giving preference to the facts of an experience, the so-called literal truth, rather than fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity. Conceived this way, the writer’s story is relegated to an inferior and insurmountable station; it can neither compete with nor live without the ur-experience. Such a writer’s sole ambition is for the characters and events to represent other and superior—i.e., actual—characters and events. Meaning, the written story has never been what mattered most. Meaning, the reader is intended to care less about the characters and more about whoever inspired them, and the actions in a story serve to ensure that we track their provenance and regard that material as truer. Meaning, the story is engineered—and expected—to be about something. And aboutness is all but terminal in fiction.
  • Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.
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  • Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
Javier E

George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140217fa_fact_packer

book industry Amazon

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business
  • Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.
  • It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.
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  • it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.
  • A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.
  • “The key to understanding Amazon is the hiring process,” one former employee said. “You’re not hired to do a particular job—you’re hired to be an Amazonian. Lots of managers had to take the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Eighty per cent of them came in two or three similar categories, and Bezos is the same: introverted, detail-oriented, engineer-type personality. Not musicians, designers, salesmen. The vast majority fall within the same personality type—people who graduate at the top of their class at M.I.T. and have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar.”
  • According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices.
  • For a smaller house, Amazon’s total discount can go as high as sixty per cent, which cuts deeply into already slim profit margins. Because Amazon manages its inventory so well, it often buys books from small publishers with the understanding that it can’t return them, for an even deeper discount
  • According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating
  • In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did.
  • Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
  • ithout dropping co-op fees entirely, Amazon simplified its system: publishers were asked to hand over a percentage of their previous year’s sales on the site, as “marketing development funds.”
  • The figure keeps rising, though less for the giant pachyderms than for the sickly gazelles. According to the marketing executive, the larger houses, which used to pay two or three per cent of their net sales through Amazon, now relinquish five to seven per cent of gross sales, pushing Amazon’s percentage discount on books into the mid-fifties. Random House currently gives Amazon an effective discount of around fifty-three per cent.
  • In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.”
  • By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition
  • In 2004, he set up a lab in Silicon Valley that would build Amazon’s first piece of consumer hardware: a device for reading digital books. According to Stone’s book, Bezos told the executive running the project, “Proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”
  • Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales.
  • The literary agent Andrew Wylie (whose firm represents me) says, “What Bezos wants is to drag the retail price down as low as he can get it—a dollar-ninety-nine, even ninety-nine cents. That’s the Apple play—‘What we want is traffic through our device, and we’ll do anything to get there.’ ” If customers grew used to paying just a few dollars for an e-book, how long before publishers would have to slash the cover price of all their titles?
  • As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market
  • But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.”
  • Publishers sometimes pass on this cost to authors, by redefining royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts, not of the book’s list price. Recently, publishers say, Amazon began demanding an additional payment, amounting to approximately one per cent of net sales
  • brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.
  • Since the arrival of the Kindle, the tension between Amazon and the publishers has become an open battle. The conflict reflects not only business antagonism amid technological change but a division between the two coasts, with different cultural styles and a philosophical disagreement about what techies call “disruption.”
  • Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”
  • n Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”
  • it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.
  • The business term for all this clear-cutting is “disintermediation”: the elimination of the “gatekeepers,” as Bezos calls the professionals who get in the customer’s way. There’s a populist inflection to Amazon’s propaganda, an argument against élitist institutions and for “the democratization of the means of production”—a common line of thought in the West Coast tech world
  • “Book publishing is a very human business, and Amazon is driven by algorithms and scale,” Sargent told me. When a house gets behind a new book, “well over two hundred people are pushing your book all over the place, handing it to people, talking about it. A mass of humans, all in one place, generating tremendous energy—that’s the magic potion of publishing. . . . That’s pretty hard to replicate in Amazon’s publishing world, where they have hundreds of thousands of titles.”
  • By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the
  • Like the publishing venture, Amazon Studios set out to make the old “gatekeepers”—in this case, Hollywood agents and executives—obsolete. “We let the data drive what to put in front of customers,” Carr told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have tastemakers deciding what our customers should read, listen to, and watch.”
  • book publishers have been consolidating for several decades, under the ownership of media conglomerates like News Corporation, which squeeze them for profits, or holding companies such as Rivergroup, which strip them to service debt. The effect of all this corporatization, as with the replacement of independent booksellers by superstores, has been to privilege the blockbuster.
  • The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year.
  • the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces.
  • he digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while r
  • Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier
  • In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”
  • The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”
  • Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.
  • These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.
  • “If they did, in my opinion they would save the industry. They’d lose thirty per cent of their sales, but they would have an additional thirty per cent for every copy they sold, because they’d be selling directly to consumers. The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”
  • Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? ♦
Javier E

New Statesman - The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...world-secular-means-god

secularism postmodernism dogmatism truth love

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.
  • Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere
  • Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.
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  • he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation
  • Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal.
  • None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power.
  • Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.
  • The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.
  • What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient.
  • If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.
  • Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place
  • Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.
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