Category: Arts
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Copyrights Expiring on The Beatles | Mutiny and Music
Interesting piece here exploring the fact that today ‘Please Please Me’ – the hit that really made the band famous – has gone into the public domain, as its 50 year copyright period has expired. The article takes the view that this is a tragedy, one that leaves The Beatles’ music open to exploitation. Anything…
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The Master – A Beautiful Pack of Lies – Which Way Will The Wrecking Ball Swing?
Spoiler alert: there’s really not a great deal of fundamental narrative action in this film. No twists to reveal. But if you’d rather not know too much about the film before you see it, don’t read on. // I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master on Friday night. Here’s the thing: I sent…
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Advice for Writers: Don’t Read Too Much Advice for Writers
There always seems to be a steady stream of posts from literary magazine sites giving lists of advice for writers. Zadie Smith has a series of 10 points in The Atlantic at the moment, highlights including Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All…
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A Pirate Book That Insists on Copyright?
Interesting story (thanks @KevinThow for the link) about Julia Schramm – a leading member of the German Pirate Party, who signed a very lucrative book deal for her book ‘Click Me‘ – more than $130k – and then proceeded to go after the very pirates who she lauds in her work. One of the key…
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Colliding Nothing into Nothing: Where Good Ideas Won’t Come From
I’m a big fan of Steven Johnson, and have a lot to thank him for. His book Emergence was massive for me in terms of my thinking in so many areas, and The Ghost Map is still one of my favourite books – particularly because I know the streets that it talks about so well.…
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All In The Mind? Thoughts on Identity and Neuroscience
Tweeted about this piece earlier today, but wanted to flag up and reflect further on Henry Marsh’s piece in Granta, detailing his neurosurgical work operating on a tumour in a pineal gland. The pineal gland is buried deep within the brain, and is thus only reached after a perilous journey through the physical matter that…