Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

"Someone, he realized, needed to come along and devise a painterly abstraction that embodied cultural sophistication and 'nowness.' It had to look classically tasteful and refer to well-known historical byways, but it also had to be undergirded by utter contemporaneity, either of sensibility or production method. Upcycling was evolving as an idea and so was perhaps itself being upcycled: iu the early Nineties it had promsied to help the developing world redeem its waste, at the turn of the century it grew to encompass the food consumption of a smaller set of First Worlders wit extra time and money, and now it would take on fine art, an even more rarefied realm of cultural production available to only the wealthy few." I found this, part of a much longer excerpt, in the READINGS section of the July Harper's.  The whole READINGS section for the month was unusually compelling. That is Seth Price's image, rocking back and forth, above.

It was my twitter feed that first alerted me last weekend to the news that Zambia's President had forced the central bank head in that country out of office and vowed lower interest rates. Good for twitter! this is proof of its value -- the value of net based social media generally -- in tailoring news.   In old-fashioned dead-tree newspapers, whence most of my news used to come (until very recently) the goings-on in Zambia would have been tucked into a small item very deep in the paper, if it was deemed fir to print at all by the papers in the "developed" world. But in fact, I deem it an important, perhaps the biggest one coming at us that day, and I'm glad to have received it when I did. One of the significant facts about the story is that it dramatically demonstrates that central banks are only independent of the executive offices of a country when they are allowed to be independent by those executive offices. In other words, they aren't really all th...