Pulitzer Committee: Award Duke Ellington the 1965 Pulitzer Prize he was denied. 🔗🎶
Tanner Greer on substance, not procedure 🔗
The trouble is that the national problems that the extremists fixate on are, for the most part, real. Their solutions are, for the most part, coherent and emotionally compelling. Those who believe these solutions are nevertheless wrongheaded must come out and prove them so. Someone who has determined, for example, that woke politics is destructive should use his wisdom and intelligence to demonstrate why the woke program trends toward disaster—and to provide saner solutions to the problems that wokeness purports to solve.
Max Richter, giving Auden pride of place in his Recomposed Four Seasons headshot. (The album is very good.) 🎶📚
“The Technocrat’s Dilemma” is as concise a framing of our current “misinformation” crisis as we’re likely to get: “The technocratic response to misinformation and conspiracy theory only exacerbates the problem and further validates the most extreme reactions.” 🔗
I basically agree with Gruber’s take on Netflix: Netflix would be better-served by focusing more on quality, less on quantity.
But that raises a question Gruber’s not too interested in exploring (and I’m not really, either, if I’m honest!): what is “quality”? 🔗📺
I relished Roy Foster’s Conversation with Tyler on Irish history, economics, and culture. I read Foster’s Modern Ireland years ago, and I’m eager now to read his books on Yeats and Heaney. 📚 🔗 🎧
“We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.”
~ Michel Houellebecq, from an excellent profile by Justin E.H. Smith 🔗📚
Glad to see a third-party candidate enter the MN governor’s race. I don’t expect I’ll agree with the whole platform. But I agree with the principle: our current parties are broken beyond repair. 🔗🗳
Put the Oscars out of their misery 🔗 🎞
Most of the ceremonies feature flickers of genuine emotion amid hours of sanctimonious, self-serving or scolding speeches. ~“Opinion: Put the Oscars Out of Their Misery” Yes. Oddly, this op-ed doesn’t touch on the main reason to get rid of awards shows: we don’t have any agreed-upon aesthetic standards for deciding what’s deserving of awards—so what’s the point? My rule would be that you’re only allowed to hold an awards ceremony if Ricky Gervais hosts it.
The world needs more Cavafy 📚
