Reviews and News:
The harm of smarm: “Broadly speaking, smarm is a form of extremely ingratiating behavior—unctuous attempts to curry favor while remaining insistently ‘positive.’ It’s always been around in mild form (mainly in the world of advertising), but in recent years it’s been on the rise in popular culture, journalism, and, more immediately, in politics. Smarm’s imperial assault on the larger cultural conversation became evident a few years ago when the website BuzzFeed announced that it would no longer publish negative book reviews. The decision was heralded by the site’s bosses as though it were a virgin birth.”
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A defense of the soul: “So, here’s the startling truth: nothing in neuroscience – nothing in our understanding of the brain – conflicts with the idea that we are immaterial souls in our bodies. Even if, as may well be the case, everything that goes on in our minds, every last thought, memory, sensation and desire can be correlated with events in our brains, this is entirely consistent with our minds being wholly separate entities that are causally interacting with our brains.”
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Michael Dirda on pulp fiction’s mummies.
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The forgotten brothers Le Nain: “The three Le Nain brothers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu, were celebrated and sought after in their lifetimes. Their work has long been revered, especially by artists, including Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Edouard Manet and Georges Braque. But they are unfamiliar today, and little is known about them apart from their all having been born around 1600 in Laon, in the Picardy region of northern France. Antoine and Louis, the eldest and middle brothers, both died in 1648.”
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The new politicized Tate Modern: “In one section, entitled ‘Performer and Participant’, we’re told that we, as participants, will be ‘directed by an artist and political activism’. Quite what this means is unclear. One label tries to explain, stating that participatory art ‘addresses the role of the institution that collects and displays art… and critically proposes an alternative system of value in which the live act prompts us to consider how we might embody a shared heritage in new ways’. Illuminating stuff.”
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David Bahr recommends a book for teaching children (and “Greekless grownups”) Greek.
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The pleasures of Paradise Lost.
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The fastest swim stroke explained.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman examines the precarious future of public radio:
“Public radio is facing an existential crisis. Some of the biggest radio stars of a generation are exiting the scene while public-radio executives attempt to stem the loss of younger listeners on traditional radio. At the same time, the business model of NPR—the institution at the center of the public-radio universe—is under threat: It relies primarily on funding from hundreds of local radio stations, but it faces rising competition from small and nimble podcasting companies using aggressive commercial strategies to create Netflix-style on-demand content.
“All this has amplified tensions between veteran radio executives who continue to cling to popular broadcast shows like ‘Car Talk’ and those who believe podcasting, with its innovative storytelling and younger audiences, is the future. At NPR itself, a top executive recently issued guidelines to staff barring on-air promotion of its much-praised new app NPR One. Encouraging listeners to tune in via the app could alienate the local public-radio stations that pay NPR for shows.
“‘It’s a moment of anxiety systemwide,’ said Ben Calhoun, vice president of content and programming at Chicago public-radio station WBEZ and a former producer with ‘This American Life.’ ‘There’s a tendency for that dynamic to manifest as sort of protectionist and defensive.’
“‘A Prairie Home Companion’ is an emblem of the outgoing era, not just old-timey in its sound, but also in the appointment listening of its audience. Every Saturday night at 6 p.m., tucked in their log-cabin weekend home in southern Maryland, Connie and Sterling Mehring stream the two-hour live program online, sip white Russians and listen to Mr. Keillor sing, host musical guests and deliver the news from his fictional town of Lake Wobegon. The show’s current weekly audience is 3.2 million, down nearly a million from a decade ago but still the third-largest audience among weekend programs on public radio.
“The Mehrings, both in their 60s, are unsure about the show’s incoming host, 35-year-old musician Chris Thile. ‘We’ll try it for a while,’ Ms. Mehring said. ‘Until they force us not to,’ her husband broke in, ‘if the guy’s not very good.'”
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Image of the Day: Guanajuato
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Poem: Chad Davidson, “A Body in Motion”
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