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In the last generation or so, the classic script of Babe Ruth, Harmon Killebrew and Rivera has largely deteriorated into a mess of squiggles and personal branding.
It is not just baseball, of course. The legible signature, once an indelible mark of personal identity, is increasingly rare in modern life. From President Obama, who sometimes uses an autopen, to patrons at a restaurant, few take the time to carefully sign their names.
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While concert soloists are commonly expected to perform from memory, it is very rare for a chamber ensemble to do so. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Kolisch Quartet built a reputation on performances free of sheet music, a high-wire act few ensembles have copied. For a group to perform without printed music requires both thorough preparation and absolute trust among players. “Everyone needs to know in advance not just their own part, but everybody else’s as well,” Mr. Sirota said.
Yet today more string quartets are taking up the challenge, part of a generation for whom independence from the printed page is only part of a wider search for depth and freedom of musical expression. In 2010 the Parker Quartet gave a run of Haydn performances by heart. Last November the JACK Quartet performed a work by Georg Friedrich Haas in complete darkness.
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“The thesis of the book is that the university essentially facilitates (seemingly knowingly, and in some aspects strategically) a party pathway through college, which works reasonably well for students who come from very privileged backgrounds. The facilitatory methods include: reasonably scrupulous enforcement of alcohol bans in the dorms (thus enhancing the capacity of the fraternities to monopolize control of illegal drinking and, incidentally, forcing women to drink in environments where they are more vulnerable to sexual assault); providing easy majors which affluent students can take which won’t interfere with their partying, and which will lead to jobs for them, because they have connections in the media or the leisure industries that will enable them to get jobs without good credentials; and assigning students to dorms based on choice (my students confirm that dorms have reputations as party, or nerdy, or whatever, dorms that ensure that they retain their character over time, despite 100% turnover in residents every year).”
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Although the whole “avoid saturated fat” thing came about largely because regulators were too timid to recommend that we “eat less meat,” meat in itself isn’t “bad”; it’s about quantity and quality. So at this juncture it would be natural for a person who does not read volumes of material about agriculture, diet and health to ask, “If saturated fat isn’t bad for me, why should I eat less meat?”
The best current answer to that: It’s possible to eat as much meat as we do only if it’s grown in ways that are damaging. They’re damaging to our health and the environment (not to mention the tortured animals) for a variety of reasons, including rampant antibiotic use; the devotion of more than a third of our global cropland to feeding animals; and the resulting degradation of the environment from that crop and its unimaginable overuse of chemicals, soil and water.
Even if large quantities of industrially produced animal products were safe to eat, the environmental costs are demonstrable and huge. And so the argument “eat less meat but eat better meat” makes sense from every perspective. If you raise fewer animals, you can treat them more humanely and reduce their environmental impact. And we can enjoy the better butter, too.
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It is a staggering sum for a fiddle: Its $45 million base price is more than enough to have saved both New York City Opera, which has folded, and the San Diego Opera, which is also closing because of money woes, or to buy several hundred top-of-the-line concert-quality grand pianos. And it underscores the way collectors have driven up the price of rare instruments in recent decades, with inflation far outpacing, say, musicians’ wages.
Violas are sometimes thought of as the unloved stepsisters of violins — rarely in the spotlight, played by fewer famous virtuosos, with less music composed specially for them. But it is precisely their status as second-class citizens that has made this viola so valuable: While there are roughly 600 violins made by Antonio Stradivari, only around 10 of his violas are known to have survived intact. That makes this instrument, the “Macdonald” viola, rare indeed.
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In some ways, economics is like medicine two centuries ago. If you were ill at the beginning of the 19th century, a physician was your best bet, but his knowledge was so rudimentary that his remedies could easily make things worse rather than better. And so it is with economics today. That is why we economists should be sure to apply the principle “first, do no harm.”
This principle suggests that when people have voluntarily agreed upon an economic arrangement to their mutual benefit, that arrangement should be respected. (The main exception is when there are adverse effects on third parties — what economists call “negative externalities.”) As a result, when a policy is complex, hard to evaluate and disruptive of private transactions, there is good reason to be skeptical of it.
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“The virtues of simplicity are many, and also too easily dismissed. In hip-hop especially, where complexity is too often equated with progress, the straightforward can get a bad rap. And yet it’s music like this, distilled down to first principles, that moves the genre, and gives it many of its signature moments.”
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Microsoft accused the former employee of stealing company trade secrets in the form of software code for the Windows operating system, and leaking the software to a blogger. In an investigation, the company figured out who revealed the information by reading the emails and instant messages of the blogger on his Microsoft-operated Hotmail and message accounts.
While Microsoft’s actions appear to have been legal and within the scope of its own policies, its reading of the private online accounts of a customer without a court order was highly unusual and raises questions about its protections for customer data, privacy lawyers say.
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Government searching of email accounts predates the Obama administration, but Judge Facciola, a former state and federal prosecutor who has been reviewing warrants as a judge since 1997, said he was increasingly concerned about the breadth of government searches. He said he was also troubled by the fact that the Justice Department never said how long it planned to keep the seized data or whether it planned to destroy information that proved irrelevant to the case.
A decade ago, searches were more straightforward. If the authorities had evidence that someone was hiding drugs in a storage unit, for instance, prosecutors applied for a warrant so F.B.I. agents could open the unit, look through the contents and seize any drugs they found.
The Justice Department, however, does not treat email accounts like storage units. Prosecutors asked Judge Facciola for the authority to take everything in the account and search it for evidence of wrongdoing. Even though the government would have everything, it only considered the evidence to be “seized.” The argument is similar to the Obama administration’s justification for collecting the phone records of every American: that the authorities do not know what is relevant until they have reviewed everything.
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Seven years after their dispute began, Viacom and YouTube, a unit of Google, announced Tuesday morning that they had settled a copyright violations battle out of court. The agreement comes just before the two companies were to return to court next week and reflects the changed landscape concerning allegations of copyright violations on the web.
Neither Viacom, the owner of cable channels like Comedy Central and the Paramount Pictures movie studio, nor YouTube, the leading global platform for online video, would reveal the terms of the settlement, but the digital news site ReCode reported that no money passed hands.
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shaun james bockert 