Through this reliance on Netflix, I’ve seen a new television pantheon begin to take form: there’s what’s streaming on Netflix, and then there’s everything else.

When I ask a student what they’re watching, the answers are varied: Friday Night Lights, Scandal, It’s Always Sunny, The League, Breaking Bad, Luther, Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Arrested Development, The Walking Dead, Pretty Little Liars, Weeds, Freaks & Geeks, The L Word, Twin Peaks, Archer, Louie, Portlandia. What all these shows have in common, however, is that they’re all available, in full, on Netflix.

Things that they haven’t watched? The Wire. Deadwood. Veronica Mars, Rome, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos. Even Sex in the City.

It’s not that they don’t want to watch these shows — it’s that with so much out there, including so much so-called “quality” programs, such as Twin Peaks and Freaks & Geeks, to catch up on, why watch something that’s not on Netflix? Why work that hard when there’s something this easy — and arguably just as good or important — right in front of you?

Markets influence taste.

The New Canon - The LARB Blog

Dana Gioia:

The modern assumption that writers and artists are dreamy, impractical people is both odd and quite insulting to creative people. Sophocles was a general, Goethe a scientist and statesman. Shakespeare was the most successful entertainment entrepreneur of Renaissance England. I had no particular interest in business, but I had to make a living, and I realized that I had a talent for managing enterprises such as literary magazines and films series. So I took the plunge and went to business school. I found the business world very demanding but also a good place for hard-working and talented people—better, I think, than the university. I let absolutely no one at General Foods know that I was a poet. I kept my two lives entirely separate. It wasn’t until years later when Esquire featured me in a special issue of “Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America” that my secret life was revealed to my colleagues. I didn’t enjoy the sudden celebrity. It only complicated my life. Never underestimate the advantages of anonymity.

Dana’s brother Ted Gioia:

If you asked me to sum up my view of music in one sentence, I could do it: music is a change agent and a source of enchantment. When people start understanding the arts in those terms, you don’t need to sell them on culture. They come out of curiosity, desire, and self-interest. Teachers can help spur this process, but it’s a different kind of teaching than you find in most classrooms

The Arts - €”Agents of Change and Source of Enchantment | Catholic World Report

Billions of dollars have poured into the continent to fight killer diseases. But the most basic killer, injury, is neglected.

I have never once thought about this before.

Africa'€™s Trauma Epidemic