Media Censures: The Hutchins Commission on the Press, the New York Intellectuals on Mass Culture

Around the middle of the 20th century, two groups of American intellectuals turned their attention to the mass media. The scholars on the Commission on Freedom of the Press, chaired by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, assessed the American news media. Dwight Macdonald and his fellow New York intellectuals assessed the American entertainment media and other forms of mass culture. On the whole, both groups were appalled. Hutchins et al. and Macdonald et al. inhabited different worlds—the intellectual establishment and the intellectual antiestablishment—yet the two groups developed parallel critiques. Comparing them reveals important aspects of the role of midcentury intellectuals, particularly their attitudes toward mass media and mass society, officialdom and power. It also raises provocative questions about the forces that shape research agendas

On an unhappy marriage, Henry James and atoms : Vladimir Nabokov reading (on) Anton Chekhov

Nabokov’s lecture on Anton Chekhov stands out for its numerous citations from Korney Chukovsky’s 1947 article ‘Friend Chekhov.’ At the same time, however, the lecture contains many more references to other critics, as well – some of them explicit, though not necessarily clear, others more concealed. In an attempt to trace the sources Nabokov used when drafting his Chekhov lecture, the article offers a concrete view of Nabokov’s critical laboratory. Additionally, the article sheds light on his relation to other critics and critical movements, more specifically with respect to the competing ‘tendencies’ at work in the canonization of Chekhov’s oeuvre during the interwar period: Russian émigré, Soviet, and Anglo-American

Towards a New Architecture for Financial Stability: Seven Principles

In this paper we use insights from organizational economics and financial regulation to study the optimal architecture of supervision. We suggest that the new architecture should revolve around the following principles: (i) banking, securities and insurance supervision should be further integrated; (ii) macro prudential supervisory function must be in the hands of the central bank; (iii) the relation between macro and micro supervisors must be articulated through a management by exception system involving direct authority of the macro supervisor over enforcement and allocation of tasks; (iv) given the difficulty of measuring output on supervisory tasks, the systemic risk supervisor must necessarily be more accountable and less independent than Central Banks are on their monetary task; (v) the supervisory agency cannot rely on high powered incentives to motivate supervisors, and must rely on culture instead; (vi) the supervisor must limit its reliance on self regulation; and (vii) the international system should substitute the current loose, networked structure for a more centralized and hierarchical one.Banks, international financial markets, systematic risk

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Was Shylock Jewish?

Discusses the invention of Shylock's Jewishness as a reaction to Sir Henry Irving's popular Victorian productio

Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

Senecan Progressor Friendship and the Characterization of Nero in Tacitus' Annals

Argues that Tacitus’ shaped his account of Seneca and the characterization of Nero within his social environment according to features characteristic of Seneca’s conception of friendship. Surprisingly, Tacitus assigns to Nero an active power: The emperor drives a ubiquitous inversion of the social values promoted by his mentor. Patterns of Seneca’s social thought are adduced to characterize not only the portrayed emperor but also the political institution itself