• Public Domain 2020

    Gutsy piano students everywhere can now legally photocopy Chopin’s Préludes as they sweat over its tangled passages.

  • Drawing or Color, Part III: The Neoclassicists vs. The Romantics

    Ingres considered bright colors “anti-historic” and warned his students against them. “Better to fall into gray,” he said, “than into bright colors.” Color, as Delacroix saw it, was essential to painting. “Remember,” he urged in his journal, “the enemy of all painting is gray.”

  • QFT: The World is Stranger Than You Thought

    Beginning with studies of electromagnetism, scientists have come to understand reality in such a way that there really is no such thing as tiny bits of matter that exist independently and that cannot be divided. Atomism (in any traditional sense) is dead. Reality is not what we thought it was.

  • On the Importance of Forgetting

    Most attention in our culture is given to the importance of remembering. But it turns out that forgetting can be just as important. The inability to forget can be as destructive as the inability to remember.