“No opinion should be held with fervour. No one holds with fervour that 7 × 8 = 56 because it can be shown to be the case. Fervour is only necessary in commending an opinion which is doubtful or demonstrably false.”
Voltaire
Monthly Archives: May 2014
What most people in Silicon Valley forget
From Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign, quoted by John Cassidy in his review of her autobiography.
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved the goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory…. Now look, you built the factory and it turned into something terrific, or great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid that comes along.
That clip from her campaign is on YouTube.
The Art of Bach
On Tuesday evening we went to a wonderful Bach recital by the current Humanitas Professor of Music, the pianist Angela Hewitt, who took “The Art of Bach” as the theme for her professorship. She performed The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080), which Bach composed during the last years of his life and did not live to complete. It took well over an hour of sustained concentration, and she stopped exactly where Bach did, in a way that was intensely moving, and had some members of the audience in tears.
Also interesting to see that she had the score on an iPad and had two Bluetooth pedals for noiseless page-turning.
The other intriguing aspect of the performance was the instrument she played — a Fazioli Concert Grand, a truly fabulous piano, with a price tag to match. As the musician sitting next to us observed, it costs as much as the apartment you’d have to buy to accommodate it.