The National Endowment for the Arts at 50: Is the Future of Arts Funding a Positive One? – The Atlantic

One morning last August I visited Williams College in Massachusetts to teach a workshop on “building a life in the arts” with a group of racially, geographically, and economically diverse young people working at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Later that night I attended a show at the theater, where I saw these idealistic apprentices taking…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination – The Atlantic

Last week I critiqued Bernie Sanders for dismissing reparations specifically, and for offering up a series of moderate anti-racist solutions, in general. Some felt it was unfair to single out Sanders given that, on reparations, Sanders’s chief opponent Hillary Clinton holds the same position. This argument proposes that we abandon the convention of judging our…

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The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems — The Development Set — Medium

The “reductive seduction” is not malicious, but it can be reckless. For two reasons. First, it’s dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve mistakenly diagnosed as easily solvable. There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity. There are so many examples. As David Bornstein wrote in The…

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