Currently reading: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by Ada Palmer 📚
Noah Smith: “The authoritarians of the world are already making a pretty good case for liberal democracy simply by being incredibly incompetent.”
The Cineaste’s Guide to Watching Movies While Stoned. This was basically my life back in the day. Not gonna be more specific.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt: “One day, a government source informed the synagogue that we would be expected to support the war — or else. It was then that my wife and I decided to leave the country.”
Alternate spelling. Pangram!
“If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that decentralize power?” — The Battle for the Soul of the Web - The Atlantic
Announcing a blogging hiatus – though I’ll probably be here at micro.blog more than in the past.
announcement
I won’t be blogging here for the foreseeable future, for reasons I explain here.
I will continue, God willing, to produce my weekly newsletter, and I will post photos and links at my micro.blog page.
Thanks to all for reading.
UPDATE: See more recent thoughts here.
seed funding for the arts
The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing - by Ted Gioia:
There are a hundred non-profit foundations in the arts that could solve this problem with a modest allocation of resources. If the Duke Foundation, for example, funded 50 people in 50 cities with $50K per year to cover their local music scene it would cost a grand total of $2.5 million. And, if they got ambitious, they could place 4 writers in each city, and still only spend around $10 million.
Did you get that? You could have in-depth arts coverage in every major city for less than the cost of a sneaker endorsement from a third-tier NBA star or the salary of the University of Alabama’s football coach. That’s chump change for those well-funded arts institutions, and it would have an immediate positive impact on culture and arts everywhere in this country.
But they don’t do it. They don’t even consider doing it, as far as I can tell. Who can say why. Maybe journalism isn’t glamorous enough for institutions that prefer to anoint geniuses.
This is a brilliant idea by Ted, and I desperately hope some foundation leaders will read it. Throwing money at “geniuses” — the great majority of whom are already well-fixed — is like giving your money to Yale or Harvard, AKA hedge funds with universities loosely attached. It does nothing to nurture or generate a culture of creativity — and a culture is precisely what we need.