Is there a site like Arts & Letters Daily except not so stupid?

Jackson’s Lord of the Rings represents the victory of special effects over dramatic art. ... Time was when celluloid images captured in the initial shoot formed the basic, intractable material from which a film editor worked. Today, the “post-production” phase of film making is misnamed: without editing constraints, production is a continuous process. Borrowing from the pumped-up visual rhetoric of TV commercials and video games, editors now recolor images, alter motion, add or delete whole objects, including characters, from scenes.

... Films promise so much. Yet what have they delivered? Between 1939 and 1942, barely a decade after the advent of sound, Hollywood could produce Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, His Girl Friday, Casablanca, Fantasia, and The Maltese Falcon. Ask yourself, how much better have movies gotten since then?

the article itself is lamer than the description

Many thanks for writing. We do appreciate your comments. Needless to say, we do not always agree with everything we link on our page, either in their tones or in their contents, but we think this piece is provocative (in a good way) and evidently it has provoked you!

Being provocative is the main criterium for Matt Drudge's site -- I would prefer competence and intellectual responsibility from Arts & Letters Daily.

yeah bill bennetts problem is that hes just too damn smart... go on right wingers use your big fucking brains to defend him by pretending he was misunderstood while ignoring that the racist statement was linking blackness to crime instead of poverty

(Oddly enough, I do like reading the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I don't think it has exactly the same negatives that A&LD has, plus it does a lot of real reporting.)

funny tho, i always forget about aldaily until this thread pops up. if its rss feed sent you right to the articles it'd be much better.

still love the chronicle but christ the aldaily is um problematic

"The global economy has its ugly corners but the overall system delivers more happiness than all the failed utopias of the past. Disagreeing with this makes you a pathetic faggot, SOME AUSTRIALIAN COLUMNIST explains..."

"do you think Hitler was bad? Guess what, Stalin was really bad also. BOOK REVIEWER FOR SPIKED ONLINE elucidates..."

You doubt that Malcolm X was a paragon of humanitarianism, that gender is a construction, that Native American myth is true? You’re culturally incompetent...

isnt gender a construct by its own definition?

"For most persons, gender identity and biological characteristics are the same. There are, however, circumstances in which an individual experiences little or no connection between sex and gender; in transsexualism, for example, biological sexual characteristics are distinct and unambiguous, but the affected person believes that he or she is—or ought to be—of the opposite sex (see transsexualism). Gender identity is not fixed at birth; both physiologic and social factors contribute to the early establishment of a core identity, which is modified and expanded by social factors as the child matures."

from the ruthlessly liberal encyclopedia britannica

that Native American myth is true?

this is even more o_O frankly!

liberals be sacrificing crops to ravens and cannibalizing other tribes

Hardly anyone bothers using this valuable distinction anymore, but yeah:

sex = biological
gender = social construction / cultural role

one thing abt reading something like A&LD regularly, you start to notice how lame and contrived the vast majority of these essays/columns are. i'd need examples to explain, but i stopped checking it every day after i realized i felt like i was reading the same six articles over and over again with different names. and yeah the libertarian angle is annoying: who needs to read another article about how milton friedman was god?

there was one a while back on hannah arendt that basically dismissed her entire oeurve by complaining that she was hard to read!

yeah, otm. but in a way, that's more revealing of the stasis of opinion represented in a particular pub's editorial line -- if you link to stuff from City Journal and the NY Sun and the Telegraph and WSJ all the time, well, that's what you're going to get.

they don't seem to link to anything actually in the chronicle very much, either.

Didn't the current guy take over arts & letters daily from someone else? Was it better before?

Suspicion of the public and fear of the future underpin much political analysis these days, with Al Gore a prime example... more»

(hmm ok they link to the chronicle more often that i thought)

part of the publication stasis and repetitiveness of articles = freelance writers have to pay rent every month

the whole "I can pitch professionally" skill-set exacerbates this, since the impulse is then to (very professionally) pitch publications articles that (very professionally) conform to their style, worldview, and mechanics

which means it's not just your perception that the publication is predictable to the point of self-parody -- it means that people are actually trying to cover their rent by thinking up the ultimate in Exactly What That Publication Would Run

"do you think Hitler was bad? Guess what, Stalin was really bad also. BOOK REVIEWER FOR SPIKED ONLINE elucidates..."

-- gff, Thursday, August 30, 2007 2:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Haha, I had never HEARD of Spiked before I started reading A&L

yeah, i'm still a little unclear on what it is or is trying to be. some kind of "intelligent lad" kind of thing, i guess.

Pro-choice groups stand for women's rights to choose how and when to have babies. Could this ever amount to old-fashioned eugenics?... more

ugh

I haven't visited this site in over a year and I am saner for it.

Weary of global-warming hysteria, John Tierney needed a fresh view. So he went to the scourge of eco-catastrophism... more» ... more»

lol holy shit

Weary of having to worry about stuff, John Tierney needed a fresh strawman ...

Vampires do not exist. In fact, it seems the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Do the math... more»

really, guys?

haha they're really scraping the barrel

wonder what paulhw has to say about that

Dear Readers...

Along with many friends, I’ve felt frustrated in recent years trying to reconcile wildly opposed claims about global warming. In order to advance better understanding, Doug Campbell and I have created a new website. If global warming issues interest you, we invite you to visit
Climate Debate Daily.
http://aldaily.com/sigsmall2.gif

because the article's so freaking thought-provoking that it manages to say absolutely nothing at all of any interest, which is right up aldaily's alley

seriously, though, they have an incredible eye for pieces that seize on a seemingly mundane angle and then proceed to go on and on without getting anything out of it, not even navel-gazing or overthinking, just putting words in front of one another without any of it having any particular thrust whatsoever

(Fully aware of the irony of me saying that BTW, but that should tell you something!)

some nice shirts here

http://www.cafepress.com/aldaily

more»

^^ this alone is enough to make me laugh now

haha i love this thread

John Milton was a champion of liberty, to be sure. But in his language and outlook, he was not a modern “secular liberal”... more»

oh no shit?

Between margin scribbles, the selection itself, and even a hair tucked between pages, Hitler’s personal library brings us creepily closer to the man... more»
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“The knell of private property sounds,” wrote Karl Marx. ”The expropriators are being expropriated.” Hardly. Look at the Bolsheviks... more»

What do girls want? A new series of vampire novels throws light onto the complexities of female adolescent desire. Caitlin Flanagan explains... more»

^^vomit

aaahahah caitlin flanagan

caitlin flanagan is a total aldaily wet dream. "corny and obvious iconoclasms all the time"

January/February 2003

The Wifely Duty
Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy.

^^ is this a gallagher one liner or something?

not maggie gallagher either

January/February 2006

Are You There God? It's Me, Monica
How nice girls got so casual about oral sex.

it is a great tragedy of modern feminism that women are encouraged to take jobs outside the home as vampires

haha!

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2006/11/write.jpg

(i just went looking to see if we had a caitlin flanagan thread yet and discovered that i started one. i guess caitlin flanagan makes me want to start threads.)

haha, I was actually thinking about reviving this thread to ask exactly what kind of tool one would be for wearing one of those shirts, and also which is worse - veritas odit moras, or brain with fork and knife

Arthur Miller’s answer to Joe McCarthy, The Crucible, compared him to a 17th-century witch hunter. But communists were not witches, they were real... more»

this is what they take away from a fairly innocuous review of a biography

on the same day:

Frankly, we still give a damn about a movie that has just turned seventy. Adjust for inflation, and its box office is the most spectacular in film history... more»

The history of the South is a dark little corner of the American past. Can light be thrown on it without seeming to defend slavery? Donald Livingston thinks so... more»

notsayinjustsayin.com

Like Arts & Letters Daily except not so stupid: http://thebrowser.com/

This is great; I think I heard of it from S1oki's twitter: http://frontsection.net/

ya my friend dan does that. happy to see that's what causing this revive!!

wow, looks cool

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/12/denis-dutton-has-died.html

damn. RIP dude. still need to read "The Art Instinct"

RIP. Kept aldaily as my homepage long after I stopped reading the articles with any regularity, just because it has such a calming layout

olden times bookmark, rip

Don't want to sound like an asshole, but this has much improved since DD bit it.

Mary McCarthy might have been a viperish, bipolar nymphomaniac. Who cares? Pay attention to what matters most: her writing...

can't even begin to say how much i want to flip off whoever runs this fuckin' site

jesus fuck

Amazon’s world. The book industry’s woes are largely self-inflicted. “This is a business run by English majors, not business majors”... more»

Wow, didn't know ALDaily was still around. I sort of like that it looks exactly the same. How long has it been a part of Chronicle of Higher Education?

I think they're getting playful with their own rep: e.g. this

Most people in academe want to get out, says Terry Eagleton, who is himself getting out. And it’s just as well. So often the intellectual is the opposite of the academic... more»

signals in every way that you're going to be treated to your 1000th "professors are lost inside their own ivory asses, universities are dying and good riddance" article and when you follow the link it's in fact a discussion of Eagleton's book "Why Marx was Right." Gotcha, ALDaily faithful!

Either that or the editors have completely lost all their facilities of reading comprehension

Why did conservation – a gentle, optimistic undertaking – give way to the more divisive environmentalism? Two words: Rachel Carson...

anybody know anything about this site?

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/

it is sfw, btw

It was ... Not very good last I looked

is there a way to see any of it w/o paying?

i only ever saw one thing on that site, that crazy mark ames hit piece on malcolm harris

its run by paul carr whos got to be one of the top ten biggest peeholes in tech journalism so

huh ok, never heard of that guy

lol'd at this one:

Lionized in his own time, Beethoven was nonetheless in a perpetual rage. Thus his fondness for exclamation points...

this site still exists?

dow jones/wsj has a new culture war site up and running?

http://heatst.com/

goddamn look at this crap

Oh what a fucking treat http://heatst.com/uk/alt-right-anti-semitism-debate-vox-day-vs-louise-mensch/

great timing: politico just put this out today

http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/05/heat-street-charts-a-course-through-the-culture-wars-004560

oh god it's louise mesch's baby...

this sounds like hell on earth:

Both Mensch and Kotch said their goal with Heat Street is to push back against what they see as the biggest transgression of the mainstream media — telling readers what to think.

“There is a lot of resistance to being lectured— especially among millennial news sources, which have a lecture-like quality,” Kotch said. “We are the antithesis of that.”

“It’s all very, ‘respect my authoritah, respect my authoritah,’” Mensch joked, referencing a punchline from the Comedy Central show South Park. (She is obviously a South Park fan, offering up a few generous recitations of relevant segments.)