via Big Think by Bob Duggan
Everyone knows there are two things you never bring up in conversation – politics and religion. In this secular age chock full of wars fought over one faith or another, many never want to hear about the role of religion in the world, unable to see any good within all that bad. But if you turn the conversation towards the safer topic of the arts, quite often you’ll hear someone long for the good old days, when great artists made great art rather than the poor efforts of contemporary art’s lesser talents. Is it possible that such Old Masters as Michelangelo were great because they lived in more religious times? Is the connection between great art and religious influence a correlation or just coincidence? Does art need religion?
Continue reading
===================================
Museums as 21st Century Databases
via RB Firehose
Great read: Museums as 21st century databases
“It is important to remember that museums have always been databases. From the founding of the first museum, our goal has been to take items that are culturally significant and protect them, catalog them, research them, and love them. We treat our collections not as objects stored on a shelf, but rather as the physical embodiment of a vast repository of data describing our cultures and our histories. In this, museums were ahead of their time. As industry has grown around us, they have begun to realize the value of stored knowledge.”
===================================
Electric Apostasy: The Day Bob Dylan Died
via Big Think by Bob Duggan
For the 1950s generation, “the day the music died” was February 3, 1959 — the day when the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” crashed. For the 1960s generation, however, “the day the music died” was July 25, 1965 — the day when Bob Dylan crashed the 1965 Newport Folk Festival stage with an electric guitar in front of him and rock band behind him to rip into a loud, raucous version of his new hit, “Like a Rolling Stone”. Bob Dylan the folk figure of the early ‘60s was dead. Bob Dylan the rock voice of the late ‘60s generation was born. “For many people the story of Newport 1965 is simple,” author-musician Elijah Wald writes in Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, “Bob Dylan was busy being born, and anyone who did not welcome the change was busy dying.” In Dylan Goes Electric, Wald tells an electrifying story of just how complex the true story of that moment was — a cultural crossroads now mired in mythology, but even more fascinating and significant when told with clear eyes and an understanding of both sides of the divide Dylan stood across.
Continue reading
===================================
Lost Words, Lost Worlds.
Emma Tonkin discusses how the words we use, and where we use them, change over time, and how this can cause issues for digital preservation.
'Now let's take this parsnip in.'
'Parsnip?'
'Parsnip, coffee. Perrin, Wellbourne. What does it matter what we call things?'
– David Nobbs, The Fall And Rise of Reginald Perrin
Ariadne: Web Magazine for Information Professionals Issue 75
Full text (HTML)
===================================
Ten myths about the French Revolution
via OUP Blog by Marisa Linton
The French Revolution was one of the most momentous events in world history yet, over 220 years since it took place, many myths about it are still firmly entrenched in the popular psyche. Some of the most important and troubling of these myths relate to how a revolution that began with idealistic and humanitarian goals resorted to the “Terror”. It is a problem that is as pertinent for our own world as it was for the people of the late eighteenth century.
Continue reading
===================================
The Hitchhiker's Guide taught me about satire, Vogons and even economics
via 3 Quarks Daily: Ha-Joon Chang in The Guardian
There are books that you know before reading them will change you. There are books you read precisely because you want to change yourself. But The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy belonged to neither category. In fact, H2G2 (as a tribe of Douglas Adams fandom calls it) is special because I didn’t expect it to have any effect on me, let alone one so enduring. I don’t even remember exactly when I read it, except that it was in the first few years of my arrival in Britain as a graduate student in 1986. The only thing I remember is being intrigued by the description of it as a piece of comedy science fiction (SF).
Continue reading
===================================
A remarkable secret archive tells the story of life in the Warsaw ghetto
via 3 Quarks Daily: From The Economist
The Nazis succeeded in exterminating millions of Jews. But they did not succeed in extinguishing their history. That is the story told by Samuel Kassow, an American historian, in a poignant and detailed account of the secret archive of the Warsaw ghetto.
Continue reading
===================================
Muralists use an entire hillside of homes as a canvas
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
As part of a state-funded anti-violence project, Germen Nuevo Muralismo Mexicano turned an entire neighborhood in Pachuca, Mexico into an artwork titled El Macro Mural Barrio de Palmitas.
Continue reading
===================================
Thomas Aquinas and God
OUP Blog by Gaven Kerr
One of the benefits of contemporary atheism is that it has brought to the forefront of modern consciousness the demand that believers offer some reason for the belief that they have. Of course, this demand is nothing new, and it even has scriptural support behind it, with St. Peter insisting that Christians ought always be prepared to give a reason for their hope (1 Peter 3:15). Accordingly, the Christian tradition has always cherished and promoted the cultivation of wisdom so that Christianity may be a reasonable belief to hold. Contemporary atheism has brought to the fore the same demand that belief should be reasonable, and so contemporary Christians ought to show that their belief is indeed so.
Continue reading
===================================
Death Denial
via Arts & Letters Daily: Marc Parry in The Chronicle Review
Does our terror of dying drive almost everything we do?
In October 1984, a young Skidmore College professor, Sheldon Solomon, traveled to a Utah ski lodge to introduce what would become a major theory of social psychology. The setting was a conference of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, a prestigious professional organization. Solomon’s theory explained that people embrace cultural worldviews and strive for self-esteem largely to cope with the fear of death. The reception he got was as frosty as the snow piled up outside.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment