“The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing,” performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson says in […]
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Irish poet Eavan Boland published her first collection, a pamphlet entitled 23 Poems, fifty years ago. To commemorate the milestone I’d like to offer this brief retrospective of her distinguished career. […]
What’s the difference between a Jackson Pollock painting and a finger-painting? Why is “The Magic Flute” so enduring, while other classical compositions have been forgotten? Leon Botstein, the dean of Bard College, examines what we’re talking about when we talk about art.
Neuroaesthetics has adopted this distinction between art and non-art objects by seeking to identify brain areas that specifically mediate on the aesthetic appreciation of artworks.
By pulling her pants down and defacing Clyfford Still’s painting 1957-J No. 2 (PH-401) (shown above, from 1957) last week at The Clyfford Still Museum, Carmen Lucette Tisch stumbled drunkenly […]
In the car, I listen to country music. Country has an ideology. Not to say country has a position on abortion, exactly. But country music, taken as a whole, has […]
After being created as a text-only destination nearly twenty years ago, the Web has increasingly become a visual destination, where images, photos and videos have replaced text as the new […]
I’d be remiss if I let 2011 slip by without a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born a century ago and who now looms larger over contemporary poetry […]
With all apologies to the memory of Theodor Geisel, it’s not the Grinch stealing Christmas this year—it’s Banksy! In Cardinal Sin (above), Banksy takes a replica of an 18th century […]
If you’re like most people, you’ve already broken your New Year’s resolutions. No worries. Here’s a different promise to yourself that should be easier, more enjoyable, and more educational to […]
“Life,” my brother-in-law tells me, “is 90 percent maintenance.” I’ve no complaints about my husband’s chore contribution in our marriage. Our “dreariness index” as I call it seems fair enough. […]
Just when you think a contemporary art megastar such as Damien Hirst has done his worst to make a mockery of the modern art world, he finds a new weapon […]
In our time of confined specialization, it’s hard to comprehend the multimedia talents of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poetry and painting helped shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot […]
A single dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms,’ brings about a measurable and lasting personality change—’openness’—lasting at least a year.
Amanda Marcotte, Matt Yglesias, and Atrios are debating the concept of “guilty pleasures” in pop culture. Here’s my theory of what guilty pleasures are. For people my age, taste is […]
“What is so distasteful about the Homeric gods,” W. H. Auden complains in his essay “The Frivolous & the Earnest,” is that they are well aware of human suffering but […]
Your mobile wireless carrier may soon have a say in the way you think about health and wellness. AT&T, through its Emerging Devices unit, plans to offer for sale health-tracking […]
The theme of Turkle’s indispensable book is in its title. It’s an old theme, originating, maybe, with the philosopher Rousseau. Technological progress is at the expense of personal virtue and the relational […]
It may be tempting to think that if you want to be innovative, your office has to “have all these weird things going on.” Not so, says Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. The real power comes from shaking things up.
With the fashion industry emerging as one of the driving forces of innovation within the Internet world, it could have an important impact on the number of women who explore […]
BY JASON SILVA Physicist Freeman Dyson has spoken of a new “Age of Wonder” centered on computers and biology. He has artfully articulated that in the near future “a new […]
Just a few weeks after September 11, 2001, the owner of a vacant storefront on Prince Street in Soho taped a picture of the lost World Trade Center in the […]
BY JASON SILVA “We are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power”. – Walter Benjamin, On Hashish Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller called themselves “performing philosophers”, using the power of […]
Rick Field left a successful career in television to become a pickle entrepreneur. Seven years later, his Rick’s Picks are carving out a mini cultural niche of their own in the American culinary landscape.
Carl Scott is probably the blogworld’s leading expert on the content of rock music (both words and music). He calls that content, once in a while, its ideological dimension. Carl both is […]
When I lived in Portland, Oregon, I spent many pleasant years renovating old houses. It’s a fine way for a semi-employed writer to remain semi-employed. One of the simple joys […]
James Wood is probably the best literary critic working today. If he wrote a review of the phone book, I would read it. This week, though, I find myself disagreeing […]
The Master Chef, part-time Paleontologist, and former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, offers a scientifically-informed approach to the ancient human art of cooking.
As print sales decline and new e-platforms pop up everywhere, the future of the book has become a source of widespread speculation. In my previous post I asked: what’s the […]
So my previous post on Walmart being change that’s, on balance, bad for us as social beings was one of my most popular and, apparently, least controversial. That’s because many so-called […]