Tag: corporations

Malcolm Gladwell and Journalistic Agenda

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I was surprised, a few years ago, to see Malcolm Gladwell being celebrated by a couple of acquaintances of mine online: after all, I’ve always thought of him as an author of, er, low-quality pop-theory books of the sort that could be boiled down into a paragraph or two, with scanty evidence and a lot of flattering platitudes directed at the reader: The Tipping Point: Social change occurs in a mysterious way involving critical mass: it is society that decides (collectively) how society ought to change, and once consensus reaches a critical mass, the change occurs. Blink: He focuses on the …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 3 — Hybridity

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This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. Last time, in Part 2 of this series, I talked about “ear training” and the skills that are required by certain kinds of music if one is to listen to them competently–the requirement of a degree of work, a degree of slogging up a learning curve to grasp those kinds of music. The parallel for my overarching analogy of those mostly eat TV dinners and junk food on the one hand, and the self-described …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 2 — Ear Training

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. Right, so last time, I drew a parallel between my view of music in the modern industrialized world, and the way “foodies” think of food in that same setting: namely, as something that has been essentially debased for expediency of production by large corporations, in the name of profit. But I’m sure those who aren’t feeling deeply insulted by this still have some sort of question in their minds about what it is I …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 1 — Background, Caveats, and an Analogy to Consider

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

I’ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over. So I’ve decided to break it down into pieces. Maybe. It depends whether that is still necessary at the end of this thing I’m writing now. It’s hard because, frankly, I think that what we conventionally include in the category of music includes …

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Did You Think About It?

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Believe it or not, the title of this post is not a reference to the hordes of students who’ve been asking me to create a thesis for them for their Graduation Requirement Presentation. (Though it could have been. The last month or so has become a stream of one-on-one tutoring sessions for people who apparently were not trained in formulating a thesis and supporting arguments. Which… well, frankly, if you’re going to test people on a skill, you ought to be making sure they’re learning it first, or it seems unfair. And the real kicker is: the students need to …

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