Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation…

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to…

The point of the forum is to allow people in the throes of the graduate admissions process to give and solicit advice. For instance, I recently learned on Grad Cafe that POI means “professor of importance,” and that if you miss a call from the area code of a school to which you applied, you…

At each screening, a computer program live-edits a movie out of more than three thousand film clips, eighty voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music. Each of these movable parts is marked with loosely content-related tags (“horizon,” “anxiety,” “white”), and the computer fits the pieces together according to an algorithm that matches tags. Sussman calls this…

[MRI] subjects’ brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. […] If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos. A…