Creativity and Tradition

Recent News

• At Aeon, The Classical Debt author Johanna Hanink traced the surprisingly early origins of Greek nostalgia for a greatness supposedly lost.
• Nathaniel Frank, author of Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America, argued at the L.A. Times that progressive activists would be wise to pragmatically engage with those outside their natural base.
• Brooke Harrington, author of Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, spoke with The Nation about the role wealth management professionals play in the perpetuation of global inequality and the undermining of democracy.
• After Piketty co-editors Heather Boushey, Brad DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum discussed Thomas Piketty’s arguments and impact in a post for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s “Equitable Growth in Conversation” series.

Stay Posted

Blog

June 26: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

The often-heard cliché that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—which has been variously attributed to Thelonious Monk, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello, among others—seems to take for granted that it’s ludicrous to use one expressive medium to comment on or respond to another. But such cross-media encounters can actually be remarkably generative. As but one example, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards points to African American literature, which has taken shape in relation to music from its very inception. What Edwards shows in his latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, is tha…