Michael Kimmelman: “The coronavirus undermines our most basic ideas about community and, in particular, urban life. Historians tell us that cities emerged thousands of years ago for economic and industrial reasons — technological leaps produced a surplus of agricultural goods, which meant not everyone had to keep working the…
“The companies with the financial resources and the political clout often impose a uniformity on the consumption of the music they believe is popular and therefore profitable. Given the ubiquity of their total command of the internet, the “world” becomes their colony and the “popular” tastes rule, again to …
Bill Marx looks at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times’ cutbacks in arts coverage: “Too many of today’s arts editors and reviewers embrace a lilliputian vision of arts criticism, a crabbed sense of its possibilities. I teach a class at Boston University on writing arts criticism, and …
“Judging from the research papers already indexed by the new search engine, the volume of academic research is increasing at an exponential rate, and one independent study says that the number of papers is increasing about 4 or 5 percent a year, with 2.5 million published in 2014. That means researchers just don’t …
“To tell you the truth, the OED was going nowhere in 1976, when I signed on. We didn’t know that at the time, but the University Press—who controlled its purse strings—couldn’t see how they could restore its relevance. Behind closed doors, discussions raged on about whether the dictionary should be …