Notes on Culture

A link blog, associated w/ jeffmacintyre.com, addressing recommended reading in art, culture, academia, society and such. I am a NYC-based freelance journalist and interactive media specialist. My writing appears widely. As principal of Predicate, I also consult in interactive content strategy for leading media companies.

Arts & Letters Daily (25 May 2009) →

The cowboy and cactus art hanging in the White House is coming down. Going up in its place: Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Ruscha, and Franz Kline… more

The idea that religion is destined to die out…

Fifth Business (Penguin Classics) by Robertson Davies

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The linkblog at jeffmacintyre.com replaces this Tumblr. Thanks for reading here and I’ll see you on the other end!
The Moonstone (Modern Library Classics) by Wilkie Collins
New Grub Street (Modern Library Classics) by George Gissing

“Queer theory and its cousins have had more influence outside the academy than anyone might have imagined.”

Who's In the Monkey Bar Mural? [Society] →

Wispily pompadoured Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s new midtown venture Monkey Bar is a bar/restaurant for rich people. There’s even a giant mural commemorating some of between-wars…

“When each side wants to believe certain scientific conclusions for extra-scientific reasons, skepticism is the better part of rigor.”

“Wikipedia can no more be completed than can New York City, which O. Henry predicted would be “a great place if they ever finish it.”

“Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their generation.”

The <em>New York Times</em> Makes Comical Statements About the Internet, 1995-2009 [Standards] →

The New York Times has issued a formal set of standards for their in-house blogs, marking the first time blogs have ever had standards (No “snark”). The latest in a rich history of…

<em>WSJ</em> Editor: 'New Nomenclature Alone Will Not Generate News' [Without Comment] →

Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson urged his charges to work faster. To underline the point, some system that feeds WSJ stories to Dow Jones Newswires will now be called…

“Celebrated as a one-man bastion of high Western culture and admired for his moral subtlety by some, Steiner was attacked as pompous, pretentious and inaccurate in scholarly matters by others. His bracing virtue has been his ability to move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph. His irritating vice has been that he can move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph.”

Seed Magazine tries on a little dataviz →

“At the moment, deploying a mix of cloud and noncloud apps seems to be the sensible middle way. But there is something freeing and almost intoxicating about embracing the cloud mindset. What if I stopped lugging around 7,000 photos and just put the 200 best on Flickr? What if I just let Google figure out who my most important contacts are? Do I really need all my college papers on my hard drive? Computers can be very heavy and depressing. Send in the clouds.”