A discovery engine for meaningful knowledge, fueled by cross-disciplinary curiosity. A Brain Pickings project edited by Maria Popova in partnership with Noodle. Twitter: @explorer
If there ever was tragically visceral evidence of how remix culture fuels creativity and copyright hinders it, it is this: Despite – or perhaps because of – millions of views in less than a week, The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust has filed a copyright claim against the wildly popular YouTube version of the wonderful short film adaptation of Wallace’s timeless 2005 commencement address, This Is Water. (Luckily, you can still watch the film on Vimeo – but that’s beside the point.)
Here is an example of a project made out of love, the existence of which harms the estate in no way, financial or otherwise, but serves the public good by way of cultural preservation and celebration of Wallace’s spirit and legacy, extending his message and allowing it to touch more lives. That the estate finds any of this harmful is gobsmacking, at once an aberration of the law and a complete failure of cultural duty.
23 celebrated cartoonists, including Art Spiegelman and Roz Chast, unite to demand action against gun violence.
A a time when 33 people are murdered with guns every day in America and homicide rates in the United States exceed those of other high-income nations by 690%, it’s tragic how little progress we’ve made since 1944.
I hope the Supreme Court will do the right thing, and let everyone enjoy the same rights. It’s going to help keep families together. It’s going to make kids feel better about who they are. And it is time.
When you kill yourself, you forfeit the right to control your own story.
The Idealist – difficult, beautiful, powerful Slate piece on the life, suicide, and legacy of open-access pioneer Aaron Swartz. Pair it with some wise words by David Foster Wallace, quoted at Aaron’s recent NYC memorial.
In a society where bookstores disappear every day while the number of books available to read has swelled exponentially, libraries will play an ever more crucial role. Even more than in the past, we will depend on libraries of the future to help discover and curate great books. Libraries are already transforming themselves around the country to create more symbiotic relationships with their communities, with book clubs and as work and meeting spaces for local citizens.
For publishers, the library will be the showroom of the future. Ensuring that libraries have continuing access to published titles gives them a chance to meet this role, but an important obstacle remains: how eBooks are obtained by libraries.
Meet the first couple to receive a same-sex marriage license in Washington state: Jane Abbott Lighty, 77, and Pete-e Peterson, 85, who have been together over 35 years.
Did you know you’re not legally allowed to sing “Happy Birthday” in public? PBS takes a look at the original ethos and aberrations of copyright law. Also see Kirby Ferguson on copyright and how remix culture fuels creativity.
T.S. Eliot once said, ‘One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose.’ … A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade, in fact. It’s large, it’s distributed, it’s low-cost, and it’s compatible with the ideals of democracy. The question for us now is, are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves? Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service for society at large?
Since the nineteen-sixties, U.S. immigration policy has been designed to encourage the immigration of family members rather than of skilled workers. In 1990, the number of employment-based permanent visas was capped at a hundred and forty thousand a year. Astonishingly, that number hasn’t changed since, even though the U.S. economy is now sixty-six per cent bigger, and, with the rise of India and China, the supply of global talent has grown sharply. We also cap the visa allocation for each country, regardless of size, at seven per cent of the total number of visas, so only a fraction of the applications from China and India get approved. (The number of temporary work visas is also capped, at eighty-five thousand a year.) As of 2006, according to one study, more than half a million highly skilled immigrants were waiting for permanent visas, and the backlog in some visa categories was decades long. Other countries, meanwhile, have positioned themselves to benefit from the talent we’re turning away. Australia allows in almost as many skilled workers annually as the U.S., despite having a fraction of the population, and Canada has aggressively courted the highly skilled, nearly quadrupling the percentage of permanent visas it grants for employment.
