Peter B. Kaufman at the LARB:
QUIETLY, ALMOST ELUSIVELY, video has become the dominant medium of human communication. There are hundreds of billions of cameras out in the world filming as you’re reading this article. Two-thirds of global internet traffic is video; that number continues to climb. If we date print back to 1455 and Gutenberg’s Mainz Bible, and the moving image to the Lumière brothers’ first public screening in Paris in 1895, print has had a 440-year head start. But Americans now get their news and information more often through screens and speakers and video-enabled media platforms than via ink on paper.
Even though the moving image has reached this juncture so quickly—indeed, perhaps because it has gotten here so quickly—there have been no mainstream usage guides that respect its leading role in our culture and our knowledge ecosystem or the rapidity with which it has arrived. There have been no popular manuals of style that focus on how we should be using video in modern communication, which is to say, how we should best be producing it, citing it, distributing it, and ultimately archiving and preserving it, especially given the vital roles it now plays in knowledge dissemination and in politics, culture, and society.
more here.
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In a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood. Asked about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped and ends up offering little more than bromides encouraging them to write every day and try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses Atwood’s banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the thing she was asked to produce.
We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments. Regrettably, 
Black History Month is a time to reflect on the central role of Black people in shaping this nation. Nowhere is that more evident than the labor movement. A founding tenet of American capitalism and our economy is that Black bodies are worth more than Black minds. This belief is continually demonstrated by the value placed on Black workers and their work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black workers risked their lives in essential jobs to keep the country operating. And in doing so faced an 
The most striking assertion in Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare may be this, written in 1946: “Shakespeare’s similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad. So if they are nevertheless good – & I don’t know whether they are or not – they must be a law to themselves.” What makes Wittgenstein think he can lay claim to such a judgment? Part of the answer may lie in Wittgenstein’s own remarkable talent for similes and figures of comparison. Given their importance to his way of doing philosophy, it shouldn’t surprise that he was good at making them, and knew he was good.
I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or describe how beautiful the stars will appear from space.
MIZDARKHAN, Uzbekistan — On a hill at the edge of the desert stands a wooden edifice above a simple tomb. It consists of four slanting poles that come together in a frame, inside of which are bundled sticks that resemble kindling. It seems a puzzling marker for a grave until you learn the legend of whose body lies inside: Gayōmart, the first human, neither woman nor man, who was created from mud by the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrians venerate fire, so the structure makes sense. It is a symbolic beacon waiting for its flame.
Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a history of pink, which may not be ‘a color in its own right’ and for which neither Latin nor ancient Greek has a standard word (it was long regarded as a shade of red). Nevertheless, Pink is as sumptuous as its predecessors, printed on gorgeous glossy paper and written with impassioned scholarship.
For the family, withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatments from a dying loved one, even if doctors advise that the treatment is unlikely to succeed or benefit the patient, can be overwhelming and painful. Studies show that their stress can be at the 
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