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Happy 78th birthday to Grace Jones!

Where does thinking really take place? Barbara Tversky proposes that thought isn't confined to language but can emerge directly from the body. Tversky is Emerita Professor of Psychology at Stanford and Columbia Teachers College. Tap here for her full interview. iai.tv/video/thinking…

"Sade’s performance, with its abrupt dynamics, vocal subtleties, and final cry of pain, is positively shattering. It represents modern popular culture at an absolute peak of quality and achievement." salon.com/2016/06/02/zom…

No music fan who lived through Prince’s sensational Purple Rain period in 1984 will ever forget it. We were all drenched in the florid extravagance of his swashbuckling self-presentation and the searing confession of his half-crippling melancholy. salon.com/2016/05/05/its…

"I had no idea Prince was living like that–in a lavish windowless bunker as characterless as an office park. Paisley Park is of course mainly a recording studio, but as a residence, it looks like a set for Edgar Allan Poe’s 'Masque of the Red Death'.” salon.com/2016/05/05/its…

“An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.” — Aldous Huxley

40,000 Years of Venus Figurines

A quarter century ago youtu.be/iFSRiDZn0hE?si…

This girl in Iran posts her singing videos on her Instagram . The regime tells her: delete it because under Islamic laws, women are banned from singing. She says: no. So they shut down her entire Instagram. And she’s not alone this is happening every day to every female singer in Iran. So here’s the real question: Why are male singers still performing in Iran like nothing is happening? Drop her videos on your pages. Bring women on stage. Or stop the music until women can sing too. Is this too much to ask? We just launched a campaign: Iranian women are calling on male singers to show real solidarity and say it loud ، Without Women, Never. #بدون_زنان_هرگز

“…art has an indispensable function in cognition, …men without art tend to be automota, or somnambulists, imprisoned in a dream.” Marshall McLuhan letter to Claude Bissel January 28, 1966

Shelley and Keats did not survive to write the great epics of their maturity, and Wordsworth decayed into the celebrator of the Urzenic labyrinths of moral virtue who so disfigures The Excursion. Of the great Romantics only Blake kept his full powers into a magnificent maturity.

I guess the saying is true: Be careful what you wish for. #EpsteinFiles theguardian.com/us-news/2025/n…

Maher: Have college students changed in recent years? Do they have trouble keeping up with the amount of reading that used to be required? Me: The answer is yes, they have declined. I can see it in my own class, which I've taught for 22 years. So we had a meeting with the dean at Harvard because grades keep getting higher. 80% of students get an A. The average GPA is 3.8 out of 4. Maher: Grade inflation, they call it. Me: No, they don't. The dean said, we prefer to call it "grade compression." Maher: Oh (with a hand clap, head roll back, and sigh). Me: Maybe our students are just getting better and better. So I knew this was malarkey, so I actually had the data, because I've been giving kind of the same exam for 22 years, and it's multiple choice, so it's subjective. So there's a constant benchmark, and performance has been going down, at least in my class. 10 percentage points from 2004 to now. So the standards have been going down. Students do read less. I think they spend more time on extracurriculars than on classwork, and I just know that... Maher: Scrolling, scrolling. Me: That's when they're in the room, yes. Maher: I have to tell you, they're not going to read your book, not because it's not great. It is. It's a book. They won't read this. I read a letter that a student wrote to the Crimson, saying you can get out of this university without having fully read a whole book. Me: That might be true. Now I've got to say, there are a lot of really brilliant, really studious Harvard students, like intimidatingly smart. But there's also a lot for whom it's kind of a luxury cruise, and academics is just one of the activities. So our dean, to be fair, our dean has noticed, and she has changed the guidelines going forward. She's actually told students--you wouldn't think this would be a shock--academics is your first priority. Now the fact that she had to say that, this is a kind of a radical new policy. She said that it's okay for professors to take attendance in lectures, which I'm going to start doing. That it's okay to ban electronic devices, which I might start doing. Because we actually know that taking notes leads to better memory than using a screen. Just a principle of cognitive psychology, when you have to think hard about something, when you've got to process its meaning, when it's not just a bunch of words, then you actually remember better. Just the process of writing puts it in your brain. But a lot of them have screens. There are electronic note-taking devices, but they're not as fluid and easy as the old-fashioned pen and paper. So my teaching assistants are going to hate this, because we're going to have to schlep handouts to class every time. Full Overtime episode: youtube.com/watch?v=fhQE7s… @RealTimers @billmaher