In America, the New Deal’s mobilization of artists helped enshrine creative expression as a public good. The institutionalization of art resulted in new standards and types of credentials (M.F.A. programs began only in the late thirties), as well as more nuanced distinctions between professionals and amateurs, high culture and low. The twentieth-century proliferation of American music, writing, film, and visual art was nurtured both by the state—American culture became a key export during the Cold War—and by new industries that had arisen to manufacture, distribute, and sell such wares. The sheer size of these industries up until the two-thousands guaranteed the livelihoods of a range of people—executives and managers, but also those engaged on the technical side of things, to say nothing of the mid-level hopefuls and critics’ darlings whose careers were essentially bankrolled by a company’s superstars.
The Internet was supposed to free the artist, and to democratize and de-professionalize the practice of art. In some measure, it did—while also demonetizing art itself.
You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriageability would be relegated to a footnote—a very interesting footnote, to be sure—but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of-everything book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Consider this the latest addition to the Big History category, popularized by best sellers such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe. Big History asks Big Questions and offers quasi-monocausal answers. Why and how did humans conquer the world? Harari asks. Cooperation. What explains differences and inequalities among civilizations? Diamond asks. Environment, which is to say, geography, climate, flora and fauna. Henrich also wants to explain variation among societies, in particular to account for the Western, prosperous kind.
The sky was lowering slowly, the great blue weight of it, and we could feel the air being squeezed out of the world. The height of the sky was unpredictable—it appeared a little lower one day, the shadows longer, and the next day the sky had been cranked back up. Some people looked around those days and said, see? It will go back to normal, just wait, and others said, but look.
Each day I hope for the familiar aromas and flavors to come back. I wait like the rest of us, for the things I love to return.
Moran proves herself, once more, a sage guide in the joys, as well as the difficult bits, of being a woman – of being a partner, mother, friend and feminist.
With its intimate tone, honesty and humour, The Shift sits comfortably within the “menopause memoir” genre. Baker divulges her midlife biological embarrassments and steadily softballs the book’s ultimate journey, away from shock and self-pity towards focus, harnessed anger and recalibration.
Acccording to Diana Darke, the thing called “gothic”, versions of which (Notre-Dame, Houses of Parliament) have been claimed as the national style of several northern European countries, which theorists such as John Ruskin and Augustus Pugin saw as quintessentially Christian, is deeply indebted to Arab and Muslim builders in the centuries following the life of Muhammad.
You say them as your undertongue declares,
Then let them knock about your upper mind
Until the shape of what they mean appears.
At half past two in the afternoon
You can find me in twenty-eight room,
About three or four covers deep;