Culture
August 30, 2016

Drinkin’ N’ Thinkin’ – Further Reflections (Colbey Reid)

The Fair Game Beverage Company, a small-batch distillery in Pittsboro, NC, has partnered with a Research Triangle professor and Chapel Hill mixologist to revive the ancient tradition of the symposium. The Oxford English Dictionary stylizes these Classical Greek events as “intellectual entertainment.” The distillery uses a folksier parlance. They call…

Culture
August 29, 2016

“Drink ‘n Think” Symposia Revive Ancient Philosophical Tradition (Colbey Reid)

In Culturematic… (2012), the MIT marketer-anthropologist Grant McCracken advises companies to do more than respond to contemporary culture. He urges them to try their hands at making it. They can do so, he explains, using culturematics, or “culture-making machines.” These tools aren’t combinations of silicon and plastic made by some…

Higher Education
August 29, 2016

Is The Academy A Place for “Idiots”? (George Elerick)

The U.S. economic and social model is associated with substantial levels of social exclusion, including high levels of income inequality, high relative and absolute poverty rates, poor and unequal educational outcomes, poor health outcomes, and high rates of crime and incarceration. At the same time, the available evidence provides little…

Art Theory
August 29, 2016

Metamodernism – Art After Postmodernism (Sandra Ceas)

Donald Kuspit, postmodern art critic and professor of art history and philosophy, gives a dated and surface view to what is imminently going on in the contemporary world of art in the twenty-first century when he calls it “narcissistic,” “meaningless” and “decadent” in its “metamodern” existence. Two scholars from the…

Higher Education
August 29, 2016

The Nexus of Dissensus (Victor Taylor)

We should not attempt to bring about a rebirth or renaissance of the University, but think its ruins as the sedimentation of historical differences that remind us that Thought cannot be present to itself.  We live in an institution, and we live outside it.  We work there, and we work…