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The Silo and the Demolition Crew

Howard Stein taught me that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He was defending a wall between two free rooms. China and the United States are now knocking down the building. Howard Stein used to stand at the front of a seminar room at Columbia’s Oscar Hammerstein II Center and tell a room full of playwrights that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He had earned the right to say it. Eleven years at the Yale School of Drama as associate dean and head of playwriting, seven years running the playwriting program at Iowa, ten years as the first permanent chairman of the Hammerstein Center, and a lifetime spent turning young writers into working dramatists. When a man like that tells you the Humanities are the enemy, you do not argue. You wait to understand.

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The Invisible Ledger: How Digital Currency Threatens the Last Private Thing You Own

There is something seductive about the promise of digital money. It arrives dressed in the language of progress, efficiency, inclusion, and modernization, as though the ability to hold a coin in your hand were a primitive embarrassment that civilization ought to outgrow. Cryptocurrency evangelists speak of decentralization and freedom from institutional control. Central bankers speak of reduced transaction costs and expanded access to financial services. What neither camp mentions with sufficient urgency is that the digitization of money is, at its operational core, the digitization of permission. And once your ability to buy bread requires permission, you no longer live in a free society. You live in an administered one.

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The Venus Effect and the Artifice of Assumption: Watching the World Watch You Watching Your Screen

“The Venus Effect” is a fascinating concept in painting and film that shatters the illusion of the perceived, the perceiver and the preceptor.  In the example below, the woman is peering into a mirror.

At first glance, we think she is looking at her own reflection, but the angle of the mirror deceives us, because she is really directly looking at us, not herself.  In fact, the artifice of assumption is something of an aesthetic cheat because we fail to realize she is watching us while we watch her.  She is incapable of viewing her own reflection in that particular angle of yaw.

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Meanwhile, in North Korea…

Meanwhile, in North Korea — while the whole world is watching the Vatican — the next round of Nuclear Bomb testing takes place.  North Korea threw themselves back into the arena as one of the most undesirable rogue governments today by conducting a third round of nuclear tests.  They met with universal condemnation, even from their biggest ally, China.

BEIJING — China said Tuesday that it firmly opposed North Korea’s testing of an atomic device and called for stability and a halt to nuclear proliferation in northeast Asia.

“The Chinese government calls on all parties to respond calmly, solve the problem of denuclearization of the peninsula through dialogue and consultation in the framework of the six-party talks,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

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Forced Abortion in China

In a country where every family is limited to having only one child, what happens when the family has an unplanned second pregnancy and does nothing about it? It turns out that the government just has to step in and intervene, forcing the issue. In China, where the law of the land is that you may only have one child unless you pay a king’s ransom of a penalty fee (40,000 yuan, which is 6,300 in United States dollars and is more than the average annual salary for someone living there), 23 year old Jianmei Feng had the audacity to get pregnant after already having one child and when she failed to pay the second child fine, found herself imprisoned in a hospital.

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For The Record… Part 1

I recently quit the correcting game and stopped correcting people out loud when they made mistakes. SuperGenius David Boles suggested that I should write down the errors and blog about them since stoppering them internally would do me no good. Without further ado, please enjoy the following corrections — For The Record…

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International Deaf Child Adoption Crises

Finding suitable homes for disabled children is a tough scheme to accomplish via legal adoption and one would think countries would work extra hard to find suitable and loving parents willing to adopt these special kids to save them from institutional lonesomeness and abuse.

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