— A Moral Education - Garth Greenwell, The Yale Review, Mar. 20, 2023
“HERE’S A WAY of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be protected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate, their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. These responses sometimes seem to me an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness in our response to art.”
— Bush’s Useful Idiots - Tony Judt, The London Review of Books, Sept. 21, 2006
“The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement were born in most cases many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal centre in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today, a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.”
— I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory - Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, Mar. 21, 2023
“TO BE TRULY essential, a global company must situate itself at a crux in the supply chain. Chang, who has said he studies the Battles of Midway and Stalingrad to devise corporate strategy, cannily installed TSMC between design and product. His plan was this: He would concentrate monomaniacally on one key but low-profile component of computers. He would then invite more flamboyant tech companies, the kind that blow their budgets seducing consumers, to close their own fabs and outsource chipmaking to TSMC. Chang gained trust by allaying fears that TSMC would steal designs, as pure-play foundries have no use of them; TSMC stealing from chip designers would be like a printing press stealing plots from novelists. This commitment to quietude has led TSMC to obtain a, let’s say, significant market share. Some tech companies get Super Bowl ads, adoring fanboys, and rockets for their founders; TSMC gets 92 percent.”
Currently reading: The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Currently listening: Americano - ¿Téo?