Amor Mundi, August 14th 2016
08-14-2016Why Free Speech?
The free-speech watchdog FIRE is a familiar irritant to college administrators, but until this past year, the rest of the country wasn’t paying much attention. An “epic” year is what Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it. Colleges and universities were forced to publicly and painfully deal with a confluence of national issues — race, sexual assault, gay rights, politically correct speech — mirrored and magnified in the microcosm of campus life. Finally, FIRE’s activism was syncing with the zeitgeist, in part because of Mr. Lukianoff’s role in framing the public interpretation of the campus turmoil. It was Mr. Lukianoff who made the argument, in a widely read opinion piece in The Atlantic, that today’s students are “coddled” and demanding protections against offensive words and ideas at the expense of intellectual rigor and the First Amendment. It was also Mr. Lukianoff who happened to be at Yale during the infamous Halloween costume shout-down of Prof. Nicholas Christakis, and whose viral video of it appeared to vividly illustrate his observations that many college students don’t understand what freedom of speech is, and who it applies to. Freedom of speech, he said, is not an “intuitive” concept, and Americans take its benefits for granted. “I think everyone understands that they have a free-speech right, but they don’t necessarily understand why you should have one,” he said, sitting in his eighth-floor office in FIRE’s satellite space in Washington... Most significantly, students are, wittingly or not, becoming vocal opponents of free speech by demanding protections and safe spaces from offensive words and behaviors. “Something changed,” Mr. Lukianoff said. “I don’t entirely know why.” But he can date the shift: October 2013, at Brown University, when the New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was invited to speak but was shouted down by students over his support of stop-and-frisk practices. “I count that as the symbolic beginning because that’s when we noticed an uptick in student press for disinvitations, trigger warnings and microaggression policing,” he said. “That doesn’t mean administrators have stopped doing goofy things, but now they can say, at least more convincingly, that they are being told by students that they need to do those things.””Why should we have a right to free speech and why is freedom of speech important? Continue this piece over on Medium.
Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/education/edlife/fire-first-amendment-on-campus-free-speech.htmlParks and Rec
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Seneca Village, prior to the creation of Central Park, in Manhattan[/caption] Nathaniel Rich meanders through the history of the public park:
"In an entry on parks written in 1861 for The New American Cyclopaedia, [Frederick Law] Olmsted explains that the earliest examples were pastures that English noblemen enclosed with fences to create deer pens. Trees were felled to create more open space, and the browsing deer served as lawn mowers, keeping the broad fields tidy. Olmsted goes on to discuss every pleasure ground then known to man, from Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Tuileries garden in Paris, Florence’s Cascine park, and St. Petersburg’s pristine summer gardens, of which it was said that “a policeman watches every leaf to catch it, if it falls, before it reaches the ground.” The St. Petersburg gardens were the apotheosis of a sensibility that Olmsted, in another essay, dates back to the 15th century, “of which the chief characteristics were trimness, orderliness, framedness, surface fineness.” It was understandable, the compulsion to tame and sterilize nature. Since the dawn of civilization, human beings had viewed the natural world with suspicion, if not terror. In the Bible, the word wilderness connotes dread, danger, bewilderment, chaos. This view began to change in the early 19th century when Alexander von Humboldt wrote about the natural world with a sense of wonder and delight, influencing such acolytes as George Perkins Marsh, Charles Darwin, and Henry David Thoreau. As cities grew increasingly mechanized, populated, and ordered, residents sought transcendence in rural landscapes. Wilderness could not be easily dropped into the middle of American cities, however. When Olmsted and Vaux entered a proposal for the design of Central Park, the “Greensward Plan,” their canvas was a desolate, rocky plot of more than 700 acres interrupted by swamps, steep ravines, and clay pits. The plot (later expanded to 840 acres) was occupied by several settlements, most prominently Seneca Village, one of the city’s few middle-class black communities. There were also graveyards, which were never exhumed."Form more information visit: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/better-than-nature/492716/
#Content
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Tribune Online Publishing Logo[/caption] Matt Hartman, reflecting on the rebranding of Tribune Publishing (which publishes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and several other titles) as Tronc - short for Tribune Online Publishing - takes stock of the tussle between journalism and entertainment:
"Yet, as distasteful a demon child of capitalism’s two most-hated cultures as Tronc may be, it’s not exactly alone in its approach — just less graceful. According to Digiday, The Atlantic makes 60 percent of its ad revenue from the kind of sponsored content Tronc seems to be pushing, and Medium made its sponsored content program a crucial selling point for the publications that migrated to the platform earlier this year. The simple fact is that the collapsing media market has required publications to shift their focus, at least partially, from journalism to #content — to whatever it is that will keep the doors open, whether that’s clickbait, “special advertising sections,” or content that collects ample customer data. This mishmash of journalism and other #content has prompted readers to plug their ears and cover their eyes, pretending everything is okay and that there’s not an impending crisis for the industry. But journalism is not the only place blending the lines to create one undifferentiated mass of profitable #content. The entertainment industry, in all its forms, is doing the exact same thing, only to great cheer — cheer that is in large part deserved. But that cheer also masks the fact that entertainment’s success is creating the very conditions that gave birth to Tronc... ... we cannot ignore the fact that this new industry make-up has real costs, that it is made possible by content producers taking advantage of journalism’s struggles to assert their control. For just that reason, genuine critical attention becomes more tenuous: our best critics struggle to find stable employment that can support their work, while new and diverse voices that might offer the kinds of novel insight we need can’t find a platform. The question is both whether this market will continue to produce content worthy of our attention and whether we can actually provide that attention in useful ways — or whether it will all become undifferentiated #content to service another company. It is easy, too easy, to watch Tronc’s bald defense of that kind of profiteering and laugh, but their approach is merely the less refined version of what all those in media are hoping to do today. Tronc is the ugly, unmasked face of our media landscape. If we don’t want that approach to be what determines how we, collectively, engage with our culture, then we must find ways to support a stable, independent press, one that is free to produce commentaries unmoored from a producer’s #content. There is cause for hope with the proliferation of small magazines and indie producers who have found a space in which to operate, and as publishers like Jacobin, The Baffler, and even, perhaps, The Ringer find ways to produce criticism of merit. But if they can’t insure their stability — well, then, we will all get the Tronc we deserve."Form more information visit: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/content-expanding-entertainment-collapsing-criticism/