We can now download Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas [pdf] for free. Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and vocal critic of the extension of the copyright term in United States, persuaded Random House to release the book under a Creative Commons license.
Increasingly, celebrities are taking an active interest in political causes. Are they actually making a difference? No doubt that celebrities can raise the profile of issues near and dear to their hearts. But highlighting a problem is not the same thing as solving it—on that score, the celebrity track record at affecting policy outcomes is the same as the rest of us: mixed.
Is disdain for Céline Dion innate or learned? Is our love or hatred of My Heart Will Go On the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment? Or is it something less exalted? Carl Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,†that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores.
This photo of 11-year old child bride sitting next to her 40-year old fiance captures a small, everyday moment that wouldn’t surprise anyone in the Taliban. But to Western eyes it is quite a different matter. Dutch writer Leon de Winter: Our eyes behold an abomination. Our eyes have learned to see the world from the perspective of a slowly acquired sense for humanity. And although more and more voices tell us that we — the former colonialists and imperialists — have lost the right to judge other cultures, we know just as well as this girl that this marriage is wrong.
David Byrne’s describes 6 music distribution models, each offering various levels of artistic control. The totally DIY model is certainly not for everyone — but that’s the point. Now there’s choice.
What I like about this piece is how David Byrnes defines music, and that by doing so expands the idea that it is just a piece of plastic meant to be bought, sold, traded and replayed endlessly in any context. We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs.
Heard the one about using only 10% of our brains? Not true. Doctors pour cold water on this and 6 other medical myths in the British Medical Journal. These myths were based on ideas the authors had heard endorsed on several occasions, and which many physicians thought were true. But after we carefully lay out medical evidence, they are very willing to accept that these beliefs are actually false.
Doris Lessing has been a lifelong advocate from freedom, democracy and human decency. So it is a little disheartening that in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature she has not interpreted some of the big cultural changes in the context of technology, such as diversity, lifelong learning, participation and citizenship.
February 15th, 2008, updated February 16th, 2008
My alternate history and time travel reading list.
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