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New on nybooks.com: The case against international development, rhetoric and reality in Ukraine, irresistible El Greco, Nazi art, Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the continuing Tiananmen crackdown, and an exchange on brains and minds.
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David Rieff
William Easterly, a former World Bank economist, argues that international development aid has not only failed since its inception to deliver on its promises, but is actually a trap for the world’s poor, whom he sees as the victims of those he calls “planners.”
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Jeremy Denk
Charles Ives, the crazy and brilliant patriarch of American music, loved a good cacophony. In the public imagination he is associated with collisions of marching bands in different keys and other sorts of acoustical suffering. But his real impulse was affection for the past, and for the joys and possibilities of music-making.
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Tim Judah
When we come to look back on the Ukrainian conflict, it will be hard, if it moves from its current low-level state to a full-blown war, to say that such-and-such a date marked its beginning. Since both sides are lying and distorting slivers of truth, it is not surprising that people are being dragged down into a vortex of war.
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Patrica Churchland: In Neurophilosophy I made the point that if you want to understand the mind, you need to understand the brain. In his review of my recent book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Colin McGinn gibbles up this simple message.
Colin McGinn: It is just possible to discern some points beneath the heated rhetoric in which Patricia Churchland indulges. But none of these points is right.
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Michael Kimmelman
Seeing the exhibition “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937” at the Neue Galerie, you can recover a sense of what was once radical and thrilling about pictures by Expressionists like Beckmann, Grosz, and Kirchner. A debased term, the avant-garde gets its jive back. Art matters again.
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Ingrid D. Rowland
A man who spent the first half of his life on Crete could never erase the memory of the sun-saturated colors of the Greek islands, and they recur in his work: the aquamarine of Aegean waters, the incandescent yellow of the wild daisies that carpet Cretan fields in early summer, the ravishing delicate violet of crown anemones.
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Tim Page
The “score” for one movement of a 1968 conceptual piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen began with the following instruction:
play a sound
play it for so long
until you feel
that you should stop
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Ian Johnson: What do you think of the idea that China is going through a spiritual crisis?
Hu Jia: After being in power for sixty-five years, the worst thing the CCP has done is create a sense of spiritual confusion. We have no belief or faith. Instead we have brutal competition and treating people brutally.
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