Martha Bayles teaches humanities at Boston College and is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She is the author of Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad and Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music.
Today, however, most of what passes for satire does not even meet the minimum standards of being directed toward something tangible, being undertaken in reasonably good faith—and, most of all, being funny.
It’s nice to think that a gift like that possessed by Ella Fitzgerald will always find its way. But luck matters too.
Tragedies give pleasure because they make room for art.
What Pleasants found in the Afro-American idiom was a body of music intended to comfort the afflicted.
Putin continues to play the Third Rome card that has brought him this far.
Every society in history has limited speech in some way, yet some have remained freer than others.
Is the whole world slouching toward a Panopticon of digitally enabled surveillance and control?