Founding editor of ДОЖДЬ @zygaro.bsky.social Columbia University: “the Ukrainian war is a war about the ‘I’ vs. the ‘we’ of Soviet culture, trying to draft the younger generation back to the Soviet traditionalist conception of Russian culture”

Attended New York Philharmonic concert this weekend. I went to see Bronfman play Schumann, as concert was advertised- did not notice Tchaikovsky imperialist 2nd Symphony on prog. I was horrified to see the program notes. How is this tone deaf imperialist Russian chauvinism possible in 2026?!?

"Mask of Sorrow" sculpted by Ernst Niezvestny, dedicated to the memory of prisoners of the Gulag Magadan, Russia

'Images cannot be ideas but they can play the part of signs, or, to be more precise, coexist with ideas in signs and, if ideas are not yet present, they can keep their future place open for them and make its contours apparent negatively' (John Berger on Ernst Niezvestny's work)

“We should be looking to the sadness… We should be looking to the people who produced something beautiful when they didn’t have to.”

Leonard Cohen by Eric Mulet 1995 🖤

⚡️ Russia outlaws protest band Pussy Riot, labels it 'extremist.' Nadya Tolokonnikova, a co-founder of the group, said the verdict aims "to erase Pussy Riot's very existence from the Russian consciousness."

Where once we'd have to justify an unconventional production with a newspaper article, now it seems we must justify (even apologize for) a conventional/traditional one... Via @nytimes.com

Indeed :)

“Heidegger felt poetry was most appropriate for discussing truth, as the natural process of pulling information, analyzing it, and pushing it back out might best be achieved without potentially false forced ontology. Keats loved the “negative capability” of Shakespeare…” @six18sfoundry.bsky.social

What they were teaching in young Dielman’s school

The Madhymaka Prasangikas couldn’t have said it any better themselves…

Ursula Le Guin on the subtle impermanence of phenomena: "What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives." #BuddhistPhilosophy #MiddleWay

Your happy reminder that Marianne Faithfull was born on December 29, 1946; Patti Smith on the very next day. The universe speaking to us, through song.

Condolences to her entire family and all those who loved her… May her memory serve as a blessing…

RIP to a very brave soul and her young family. May her words serve as a reminder to never take this very precious human life for granted, even for a moment…

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.” —Virginia Woolf, from The Letters of Virginia Woolf

Longed for him. Got him. Shit. –Margaret Atwood

If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us. – Richard Feynman’s mother, Lucille Feynman, after Omni magazine named him the world’s smartest man.

Boris Johnson: "Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious"

A piece that made me grateful for my NYTimes subscription… preserving the history of a certain late 20th century literary world that we likely won't see again. I mourn this loss every day as a Gen Z-er.

The right is making inroads with demographic groups typically associated with the Left (capital L): urbanites, artists, writers and Gen Z. Important piece to study as an example of how social scenes materialize into political realities.

Anya Schiffrin on the normalization of media capture, with @azmatzahra.bsky.social and Journalism 2050 hosts @emilybell.bsky.social and Heather Chaplin. youtu.be/krcMZxnFtEY?...

On the importance of Isaiah Berlin… www.tabletmag.com/sections/art...

On this day — December 16th — in 1775, this clever creature was born. Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen!

“You must be so, you cannot flee yourself / Thus sybils long ago pronounced, thus prophets / And neither time nor any power can dismember / Characteristic form, living, self-developing.” — Orphic Primal Words. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Netrebko is past her prime anyways. Weird choice for the RSO at a time when young patronage is worse than ever.

After ChatGPT appeared to validate a man's suspicion that his 83-year-old mother may have been part of a conspiracy against him, he killed her. OpenAI bears responsibility for her death because the company rushed out “a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions,” a lawsuit says.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Thank God for @garymarcus.bsky.social and his willingness to name the truth. From: open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

From a 1979 IBM presentation

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Hey @erinbiba.bsky.social I hope this finds you

incredible quote lol

I haven’t read this but holy shit what a succinct way to put it. Mistaking the finger for the Moon, as they say in Buddhist thought

It’s really hard to defend industry academic collaborations with meta as earnest, if they’re internally burying evidence of harm. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe

how to triumph like a girl by Ada Limón

Unbelievable joy getting to see Augustus Hadelich perform Baber live with the New York Philharmonic last night ❤️

The extent to which the tech companies are becoming energy companies is one of the biggest stories of the year.

Is AI inherently bad? Of course not. The question is: WHO controls it & for what purpose? Does anyone believe that the richest people on Earth are investing hundreds of billions in AI to improve life for ordinary people, eliminate poverty & solve global warming? I doubt it.

Prof Nina Khrushcheva would talk about her love for Dick Cheney in the class I took with her at The New School. Never really understood the logic and perhaps even less now:

Disheartened by the recent mayoral election in NYC, Bill Ackman is now giving advice on love affairs

The lunatics are running the asylum. Spent last Friday at a conference on the Digital Dark Ages and have been working on a paper on agnotology in this realm specifically and now the antivax cranks in power literally changed the government website today.

Perhaps the bravest words that have ever been spoken ♥️ #KadampaBuddhism

"The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant has been awarded a $1 billion federal loan guarantee that will enable it to shift onto taxpayers some of the risk of its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft for its data centers."