I get it, we keep Carmen around for the kiddies because it's actually sexless, but I do think it survives infinite exposure less well than Faust - not that Gounod is exactly Puccini either

'Life, liberty,' and this is where it gets weird

Might fool around and say the Iroquois copied the Swiss after hearing about them from Basque fishermen

Inevitably burying the lede that regardless of all other issues they owe her her money back for "minoritized"

Inevitably burying the lede that regardless of all other issues they owe her her tuition back for "minoritized"

Everyone knows standard America is midwest, which might seem to be different from standard France being the Seine basin around Paris, but maybe just proves that Ohio is the furthest extent of the hinterland of New York

These sex positive geniuses are talking about Anna Christie, ha ha - also note the last review, next time one of you tells me ego tripping artistic zero directors with Concepts aren't a parasite eating theater with the audience's enthusiastic encouragement www.show-score.com/off-broadway...

A good example of how close the left is to neoliberalism, "zero sum thinking" is supposed to be Hitler, in political economy and in culture - a rising tide lifts all boats! or as Roosevelt characterized the Republican program: "will not cost anybody anything"

"beloved works from the repertoire are featured, along with works by composers whose voices have not had the same opportunity to be heard" - works that are neither of the above are apparently not featured

"In the short run, if you want to develop a serious industrial base, you need to go through a period when finance is repressed." Class dismissed

It's funny how the anti-imperialist left can't admit what's really happening is the European establishment equating Russia with Trump and their own nativist parties, so they can use forever war as an excuse to repress them (remember Romania?), like the left semi-secretly wants

Most things are Coded the opposite of what the artist intended, because the hero gets his boring lectures and the villain gets all the impulses he otherwise represses. Artists and fans are both basically incapable of admitting this, for obvious reasons

The Metropolitan opera is of course the opposite of biased against female contemporary composers - and obviously they're not above Philip Glass pop - as such, I feel that if I could pinpoint why they've never touched Meredith I will have pinpointed exactly what's wrong with them

Tunes

"Even what the opening does suggest about Haudenosaunee influence seems to be very deliberately structured by an effort to avoid making falsifiable claims. That effort doesn’t fully succeed"

The only problem is trying to pin tribalism on the right when it's a perfectly traditional (inherent?) strain in leftism - "The venerable Stalinist institution rejects and pushes aside authentic and ambitious Leninists [...] because of their bourgeois origins"

It has replaced the Bible and Milton though - I mean I know "Look we still have Shakespeare!" is your only move, but you know it's obvious right?

is saudi arabia a cultural superpower? it's more likely than you think!

Starmer Labour - like always, like their Abundance Democrat counterparts - want open borders, and also want to be able to efficiently imprison everyone for anti-Semitism - objectively they want to import infinite slaves - or in other words, they want to be Dubai. Surprise!

"Weird quirk I could not fit in elsewhere: this song (#1 in like ten countries) has a perfectly healthy 113 million plays on YouTube Music, but “Goodbye My Lover” (#9 here, #1 in a couple places, not nearly as inescapable) is on 343M. I love how streaming inadvertantly distorts the past like this"

The typically superb new Todd in the Shadows video is a good excuse to have a Conversation about how Don't Worry Be Happy is a good piece of music if you ignore the stupid top line, and Fast Car is bad social realist melodrama like the worst songs on The Times They Are a'Changing

When you're mean to America or women, this is who you're being mean to

I wish Harold had lived to a robust 95 if only to give his opinion on Megan applying his beloved word "cognitive" to the rich morons he had to pretend to teach (he saw the whole ARC of mass higher ed, from Dewey Republican twits to temporary meritocracy to the incestuous top 20% monopoly after 1975)

You all should read the piece but isn't that portrait invaluable, like Trump interviews from the '80s when he hadn't yet perfected the character and still used big words

The real sexual essentialism: identity politics for men is a non-starter, pleading to be included in something female, compare the successful misogynist 18th century leftists versus supposedly and to some extent really sexually egalitarian aristocrats - doctrinaire meritocrats

It's funny how neoliberalism - more specifically free trade and open borders - is perfectly designed to produce nativism, because when you give all the jobs to foreigners, the only argument for why someone should have a better life than the global average is "This is my country"

Nietzsche said the problem with Jesus was he liked having women around but neglected to add that this was his innovation on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible

We haven’t bothered training and hiring people to do these jobs so might as well see if AI and magical thinking can plug the gaps. Better than nothing right? Even if it does just make things up and provide a crap service to people.

Seeing a new ad for that office robot, this one about how it takes notes for you, I assume because they're scared of that study that said notes by hand are better, and grateful again to whatever genius gave them the name that inescapably brings to mind C|i¢kH01e

The thing about Spike going out of his way to insult Quentin, while praising Martin and Paul's barely veiled race war fantasy, is that it proves "I'm blacker than you" still stings, or more to the point, the implicit: You're even whiter than I am

"And that makes sense in a way. Not only is Wright a Brit but not a single minute of this film was even shot on American soil [...] Wright said lightheartedly in a recent interview, The idea of coming to Hollywood is now in big inverted commas because nothing shoots in Los Angeles"

By the way remember when Douglas Adams' whimsical, harmless Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy that just so happened to originate at the dawn of neoliberalism in 1978 started by accusing the state of doing this kind of thing

I joked about how anti-cool-girl-ism would end in feminism disowning all their old "first woman to" heroes, and fully reverting to the sexual conformism that hated them in their own time, so God is punishing me by letting me see my prediction come true in the wild

[original post on Twitter by @eevblog] IMPORTANT message for everyone using Gmail. ︀︀You have been automatically OPTED IN to allow Gmail to access all your private messages & attachments to train AI models. ︀︀You have to manually turn off Smart Features in the Setting menu in TWO locations. ︀︀Reskeet.

What is the most underrated instrument and why is it the bass flute

He's not wrong as far as he goes but he'd still have to solve the problem that the strong dollar makes being a worthless i-banker more remunerative for Americans than learning how to do something useful, which of course is how we got here in the first place

The Enlightenment was stolen from the Iroquois and the Ottoman empire, but the Iroquois were matriarchal (this is good) anarcho-syndicalists and the Ottoman empire were pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic and the Enlightenment invented Whiteness and The Patriarchy, this is a legacy of when Big Hea

"He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes"

What's interesting is that she "thinks" instructions for living in a blah blah blah Democracy are Useful for people living in 21st century oligarchic America

Review of something else reminding to be mad at you geniuses for saying "The revelatory 2023 revival of Merrily We Roll Along, which finally clarified" - also now thinking how some Goethe society praised Hugo Wolf for "explicating" the old man (ha ha silly olds, we would never)

Superlative investigation by Moe Tkacik. A major chunk of the expansion in Obamacare the past few years comes out of Florida and Texas, where fraudsters scoured for low-income and homeless people to sell them janky "bronze" plans so they could collect subsidies.

I like the song but the book collection at the beginning of the video is itself a lovely insult www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9iz...

Great locked tweet comparing Patricia Lockwood and Tony Tulathimutte making me think how the disadvantage of the millennial Canon, whose absence you were all whining about, coalescing right on schedule, is that it means our Voices are now old enough to have become irrelevant

Why is there a shortage of single family homes? Many reasons, but one underexplored factor is that financing for homebuilding has changed dramatically My new paper dives into that history and offer policy solutions www.economicliberties.us/our-work/cap...

When will a comedian have the courage to do a joke about how pious neoliberal pro-democracy icons always do this, like Woody Allen's communist revolutionary in Bananas

Try observing all of Beethoven's metronome markings - old Try observing all of Beethoven's pianissimos - gold?

I'm just saying, leftists, if you want the actual left position that immigration is monopoly capital and the middle class versus the poor they leave behind in the old country and the poor in the country they move to, it's up for grabs

Periodic reminder that the elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about The West is the (post-Protestant?) revolution in Sweden and Finland from neutral versus the big Soviet Union to rabid versus medium sized Russia

What a treat for the library members when the piano starts ripping it up Vingt Regards style at 14:09. I guess "serialism" is like "classical music" used to be (is?) for popular music lovers (and practitioners) - a vague oppressive concept that resembles no actual music ever

Well those Democratic gains in the midterms weren't going to limit themselves!