Reviews and News:
Why does pop music sound so generic? Blame this machine. That most songs are produced by committee probably doesn’t help either.
“‘English is being mangled!’ the editor Harold Evans exclaimed over tea and digestive biscuits at his home in Manhattan last month. The tea was a reward for helping him with an urgent tech problem: his computer had frozen, and he was in danger of losing an opinion piece due that night to a London newspaper. ‘Just today alone, I’ve read three or four instances of the word “advocate” being used incorrectly!’” He’s written a book to save the language.
To catch its most notorious fugitives, Europol is making “Wanted” fliers friendlier and funnier.
Why do The Monkees matter? They matter simply because they are remembered: “The old middlebrow knowledge, the aspirations to culture of the middle class as late as the early 1960s, can be discerned in everything from the leather-bound sets of Great Books to the classical themes that made up the background music to Bugs Bunny cartoons. We had a kind of consensus that the high arts, what the Kennedy Center used to celebrate, were the goal of cultural knowledge. And as that consensus died, the music of the Monkees became part of what took its place. The pop songs of the 1960s merged with the movies of the 1970s to fill the vacuum. And regardless of its quality it became the new shared knowledge.”
In Case You Missed It:
Andy Warhol’s Catholicism: “Almost everyone who remained relevant in Andy’s life was Catholic…Being brought up Catholic gives a sense of hierarchical order, discipline and faith. Faith, when embraced, anchors the creative … I think it would also be fair to say that the romantically rich and multi-layered religion that forgives all – lest we forget! – allows unconventional traditionalists.”
How a French juggler and unicyclist helped create the Information Age: “The great Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov put it like this in 1963: ‘In our age, when human knowledge is becoming more and more specialized, Claude Shannon is an exceptional example of a scientist who combines deep abstract mathematical thought with a broad and at the same time very concrete understanding of vital problems of technology.’”
X-ray music: From 1946 to 1964, people in Soviet Russia used X-rays “as makeshift records” to listen to the music they loved because most of it was forbidden.
Interview: Howard Fridkin explains how the MPAA rates movies.
Classic Essay: Bernard Iddings Bell, “Will the Christian Church Survive?” (HT: Rod Dreher)
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