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Culture Trust

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The Baleful and the Brightest
April 10, 2017
If you want to know what the good Lord thinks of your earthly strivings, you’ll find it in this note to Isaiah 39, in the Geneva Bible: “How greatly God detesteth ambition and vaine glory.” Pretty straightforward. What was a vice for Romans became a sin for Christians. ...

Expats After the Coup
April 04, 2017
It was to be a revolution with unfettered freedoms, and, as Allende liked to say, lots of “empanadas y vino tinto.”

Shell Shock
April 03, 2017
Ghost in the Shell disassembles everything interesting about the series and rearranges the parts in the dumbest, most disorienting configuration.

Spring Cleaning with Hemingway
March 30, 2017
More and more I’ve become fascinated with collectors and collections . . . and the shadowy, idiosyncratic zones between collecting and clutter, even hoarding, where the fondness for objects becomes (so often) unruly.

The Betrayal of Democracy
March 13, 2017
The globalized power elite that may feel more at home in Taiwan or Singapore isn’t objectionable because its members may be in thrall to some sinister, unpatriotic economic loyalties, as Bannon and his retinue of Trump enablers tirelessly insist. No, the members of the ...

Useful Idiots of the Art World
March 08, 2017
In a gallery in East London, in the summer of 2016, something strange was taking place. LD50 was about a year old by then, run by Lucia Diego, and had hosted shows by prominent artists at varying stages of their careers—Dinos and Jake Chapman, John Russell and Joey Holder, ...

The Handmaiden of Entrepreneurship
March 03, 2017
In the authors’ entrepreneurial hermeneutics, all of us are born orphans, claiming true love and respect only when we create something of value in the marketplace that other people need. Here Heidegger’s concept of geworfenheit (thrownness)—the idea that our existence ...

Old School
February 14, 2017
Anatomist Louis Bolk once called humans sexually mature primate fetuses. (And yes, it sounds suitably disturbing in the original German: einen zur Geschlechtsreife gelangten Primatenfetus.) As Bolk patiently explained, our evolutionary history is something of an arms race ...

Too Many, Too Many
January 20, 2017
The “European Project”, like the United States, is in need of a regime change. It will be vulnerable to populist condemnation and counteraction until it scraps the elite designs at its origin. In a time when pseudo-revolutions have brought pseudo-regime-change around ...

Obama Out
January 13, 2017
This week, the country’s dominant mode of pop-cultural expression was the public speech—something of a throwback trend, given Americans’ patterns of media consumption nowadays. In the smartphone era, we tend not to gather around and listen to our leaders ...

The Sad Taste of Success
January 06, 2017
“For a while,” the New York Times recently observed, “it seemed as if slapping the word ‘girl’ on a title virtually guaranteed best-seller status.” There were the mass-market paperbacks, like Gone Girl, as well as the more highbrow ...

Be Afraid
December 23, 2016
In the final minutes of Doomocracy—a piece of immersive theater styled after a haunted house that ran in Brooklyn during the month leading up to Election Day—audience members were confronted with three doors. One was labeled “Clinton,” one ...