Entries from September 2010
Sep. 11, 2010
Oliver Sacks on Mythmaking
Is the human instinct to tell stories — and it does seem to be instinctive since it crosses all boundaries of time and place — a way we explain the world to ourselves? I would say that the human brain or the human mind is disposed to create stories or narratives. Children love stories, make [...]
Tags: myths · Oliver Sacks · storytelling · video
Sep. 2, 2010
Tumblng
Tumblr is having a moment. A big profile in the Times, a lot of buzz in the geekier precincts of the interwebs, phenomenal growth (the service adds 25,000 new accounts daily). For the uninitiated, Tumblr is a platform for “short-form blogging,” meaning that a “tumblelog” is a blog with very short posts, usually a single, [...]
Tags: Facebook · social media · Tumblr · Twitter
Sep. 1, 2010
The High-Low Problem
The problem [Pauline] Kael undertook to address when she began writing for The New Yorker was the problem of making popular entertainment respectable to people whose education told them that popular entertainment is not art. This is usually thought of as the high-low problem — the problem that arises when a critic equipped with a highbrow [...]
Tags: art criticism · John le Carre · Louis Menand
