Alastair Macaulay: “What makes Ms. Farrell so important? Her place in Balanchine history is central: She inspired him to make some of his most radically modernist works; opened up fresh torrents of Romanticism in him; showed how old roles could be transformed. She combined grandeur, musicality, wit, fervor and acumen to phenomenal degrees.” – The New York Times
It’s an amazingly fast shift in how people are watching. The amount they watch hasn’t gone done, just how they access it. And, perhaps a shift in what they watch too. – CBC
“There is a common assumption that people stifle feelings of empathy because they could be depressing or costly. But we found that people primarily just don’t want to make the mental effort to feel empathy toward others, even when it involves feeling positive emotions.” – Pacific Standard
It’s easy to dive into a classic book and after awhile get the feeling you’re reading something dull. Something… well, dumb. That may, of course be more about you and where you’re coming from than it is about the classic… – The Paris Review
“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” New York Review of Books
Well, she’s pretty sure she found herself — more specifically, an essay she wrote about herself and her twin sister — but the novel’s author differs. And the author of another book claims she found more of it in Waldman’s essay than Waldman credited her for. (Waldman differs, as does her editor, who was her twin sister.) Waldman digs into all this here, in a very meta essay. – The New Yorker
Trow argued that the rise of television decimated the elite American intellectual community to which he had belonged as the far descendant of printing magnates, a Harvard graduate, and a magazine writer. It cut out what he posed as society’s heart: the reading, debating, literary demographic that consumed his work. – The Nation
The board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “left intact Rule Two, the one that established that a film” — in...
