ARTICLE 1

How to Rebuild Architecture

By Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen
Dec. 15, 2014

IN architecture, everyone’s a critic. One of us, Steven, was recently driving down Elliott
Avenue in Charlottesville, Va., his hometown, with his 88-year-old mother. They passed a
house designed and built by architecture students at the University of Virginia. To Steven,
an architect, this model for affordable housing — a tough pair of stacked boxes, sheathed
in corrugated metal — was a bold design statement. But to his mother’s eye, the house
was a blight on the landscape, an insult to its historic neighbors.

“It looks like somebody piled a couple of boxcars on top of each other, then covered them
up with cheap metal and whatever else they could find at the junkyard!” she said.

It’s easy to dismiss Mrs. Bingler as an unsophisticated layperson. But that’s the problem: For too long, our profession has flatly
dismissed the general public’s take on our work, even as we talk about making that work more relevant with worthy ideas like
sustainability, smart growth and “resilience planning.

”We’ve confronted this problem before, with the backlash against what was seen as soulless modernism in the 1960s and ’70s. But our
response, broadly speaking, was more of the same, dressed differently: postmodernism, deconstructivism and a dozen other -isms that
made for vibrant debate among the professionals but pushed everyone else further away. And we’re more insulated today, with an
archipelago of graduate schools, magazines and blogs that reinforce our own worldview, supported by a small number of wealthy
public and private clients. The question is, at what point does architecture’s potential to improve human life become lost because of its
inability to connect with actual humans?

In 2007 Steven’s firm, Concordia, was one of 13 invited to New Orleans by the Make It Right Foundation to create prototypes for
sustainable, affordable homes in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Early in the process, Make It
Right’s founder, Brad Pitt, invited a few returning residents to critique the designs, most of which tried to take a basic form, the single-
family home, and squeeze it into the latest style, with little consideration of local needs or the local vernacular architecture. The
residents weren’t impressed, and asked perfectly logical questions: What’s with the flat roofs — you know it rains a lot here, right?

Architecture, of the capital “A” variety, is exceptionally capable of creating signature pieces, glorious one-offs. We’re brilliant at devising
sublime (or bombastic) structures for a global elite who share our values. We seem increasingly incapable, however, of creating artful,
harmonious work that resonates with a broad swath of the general population, the very people we are, at least theoretically, meant to
serve. Thus, a paradox: While architects design a tiny percentage of all buildings, our powers of self-congratulation have never been
greater. Although the term “starchitect” has become something of an insult, its currency within celebrity culture speaks to our
profession’s broad but superficial reach. High-profile work has been swallowed into the great media maw, albeit as a cultural sideshow
— occasionally diverting but not relevant to the everyday lives of most people.

This might be acceptable if our only role were to serve those able to afford our services. And the world would be a drearier place
without Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Sydney Opera House. The problem isn’t the infinitesimal speck of buildings
created by celebrity architects (some arresting, some almost comic in their dysfunction), but rather the distorting influence these
projects have had on the values and ambitions of the profession’s middle ranks. We’ve taught generations of architects to speak out as
artists, but we haven’t taught them how to listen. So when crisis has called upon our profession to step up — in New York, for example,
post-9/11, and in New Orleans after Katrina — we have failed to give the public good reason to trust us. In China and in other parts of
Asia, Western architects continue to perform their one-off magic, while at the same time repeating many of the urban design
catastrophes of the previous century, at significantly larger scales. Disconnect is both physical and spiritual. We’re attempting to sell
the public buildings and neighborhoods they don’t particularly want, in a language they don’t understand. In the meantime, we’ve ceded
the rest of the built environment to hacks, with sprawl and dreck rolling out all around us.

It wasn’t always like this. For millenniums, architects, artist and craftspeople — a surprisingly sophisticated set of collaborators, none of
them conversant with architectural software — created buildings that resonated deeply across a wide spectrum of the population. They
drew on myriad styles that had one thing in common: reliance on the physical laws and mathematical principles that undergird the
fundamental elegance and practicality of the natural world. These creative resources transcend style. They not only have wide
aesthetic appeal, but they’re also profoundly human, tied to our own DNA. They’re the reason both Philip Johnson and the proverbial
little old lady from Dubuque could stand beneath the Rose Window at Chartres and share a sense of awe.

To get back there, we must rethink how we respond to the needs of diverse constituencies by designing for them and their interests,
not ours. We must hone our skills through authentic collaboration, not slick salesmanship, re-evaluate our obsession with
mechanization and materiality, and explore more universal forms and natural design principles.

Not all architects are equally proficient at producing seminal work. But we do have access to the same set of tools and inspirations.
And let’s be honest: Reconnecting architecture with its users — rediscovering the radical middle, where we meet, listen and truly
collaborate with the public, speak a common language and still advance the art of architecture — is long overdue. It’s also one of the
great design challenges of our time.
ARTICLE 2

Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.

By Martin Scorcese
Nov. 4, 2019

When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine.

I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to
watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer
to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout
my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.

Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or
as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing
my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way.

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films
themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later
time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I
developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth
are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did,
cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and
their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come
face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and
enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form. And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about
that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could
be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in “The Steel Helmet” by Sam Fuller and “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman,
in “It’s Always Fair Weather” by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and “Scorpio Rising” by Kenneth Anger, in “Vivre Sa Vie” by Jean-Luc
Godard and “The Killers” by Don Siegel. Or in the films of Alfred Hitchcock — I suppose you could say that Hitchcock was his own
franchise. Or that he was our franchise. Every new Hitchcock picture was an event. To be in a packed house in one of the old theaters
watching “Rear Window” was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the
picture itself, and it was electrifying. And in a way, certain Hitchcock films were also like theme parks. I’m thinking of “Strangers on a
Train,” in which the climax takes place on a merry-go-round at a real amusement park, and “Psycho,” which I saw at a midnight show
on its opening day, an experience I will never forget. People went to be surprised and thrilled, and they weren’t disappointed.

Sixty or 70 years later, we’re still watching those pictures and marveling at them. But is it the thrills and the shocks that we keep going
back to? I don’t think so. The set pieces in “North by Northwest” are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of
dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story or the absolute lostness of Cary
Grant’s character. The climax of “Strangers on a Train” is a feat, but it’s the interplay between the two principal characters and Robert
Walker’s profoundly unsettling performance that resonate now. Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and
perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it.

But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there
in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to
satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they
are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature
of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for
consumption. Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or
Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m
going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of
what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.

So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many
places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big
screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and
streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big
screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters. That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for
Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a
theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But
no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to
disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course
they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing. But, you might argue, can’t they just go home and watch anything else they want
on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure — anywhere but on the big screen, where the filmmaker intended her or his picture to be seen.

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened
stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for
immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to
cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was
still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was
a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and
visionary.” Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an
attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now
have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but
that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the
existence of the other. For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and
inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

ARTICLE 3

The Power of Art in a Political Age

By David Brooks
March 2, 2023
I sometimes feel I’m in a daily struggle not to become a shallower version of myself. The first driver of shallowization is technology,
the way it shrinks attention span, fills the day with tempting distractions. The second driver is the politicization of everything. Like a lot
of people, I spend too much of my time enmeshed in politics — the predictable partisan outrages, the campaign horse race analysis,
the Trump scandal du jour.

So I’m trying to take countermeasures. I flee to the arts.

I’m looking for those experiences we all had as a kid: becoming so

enveloped by an adventure story that you refuse to put it down to go have
dinner; getting so exuberantly swept up in some piece of music that you feel
primeval passions thumping within you; encountering a painting so beautiful
it feels like you’ve walked right into its alternative world.

The normal thing to say about such experiences is that you’ve lost yourself
in a book or song — lost track of space and time. But it’s more accurate to
say that a piece of art has quieted the self-conscious ego voice that is normally yapping away within. A piece of art has served as a
portal to a deeper realm of the mind. It has opened up that hidden, semiconscious kingdom within us from which emotions emerge,
where our moral sentiments are found — those instant, aesthetic-like reactions that cause us to feel disgust in the presence of cruelty
and admiration in the presence of generosity.

The arts work on us at that deep level, the level that really matters. You give me somebody who disagrees with me on every issue, but
who has a good heart — who has the ability to sympathize with others, participate in their woes, longings and dreams — well, I want to
stay with that person all day. You give me a person who agrees with me on every particular, but who has a cold, resentful heart — well,
I want nothing to do with him or her.

Artists generally don’t set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience. But their art
has the potential to humanize the beholder. How does it do this?

First, beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always
be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive
what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way.
In “The Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish
consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

Second, artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven’t learned a new fact,
but you’ve had a new experience. The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “The listener to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony is
presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood
and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”

These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with
someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.

Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Picasso’s
“Guernica” is a political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it doesn’t represent, documentarylike, an exact
scene in that war. It goes deeper to give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering, and the reality of
human bloodlust that leads to it.

Of course “Invisible Man” is a political novel about racial injustice, but as Ralph Ellison later wrote, he was trying to write not just a
novel of racial protest, but also a “dramatic study in comparative humanity which I felt any worthwhile novel should be.”

I haul myself off to museums and such with the fear that in a political and technological age, the arts have become less central to public
life, that we don’t seem to debate novels and artistic breakthroughs the way people did in other times, that the artistic and literary
worlds have themselves become stultified by insular groupthink, and this has contributed to the dehumanization of American culture.

But we can still stage our mini-rebellions, kick our political addictions from time to time, and enjoy the free play of mind, the undogmatic
spirit and the heightened and adrenalized states of awareness that the best art still provides. Earlier this year I visited the Edward
Hopper show at the Whitney a couple of times, and I got to see New York through that man’s eyes — the spare rooms on side streets,
and the isolated people inside. I forget most of what I read, but those images stay vivid in the mind.

ARTICLE 4

Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing

By Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor
June 7, 2013

MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish
predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite
artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as
the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest. So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of
sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that
still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.

More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people
described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains — activating
subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion. Subsequently we
found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music — that moment
when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage — causes the release of the
neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain. When pleasurable music
is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to
respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional
moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase. The idea that reward is partly related to
anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience. Making good predictions about the outcome of
one’s actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival, after all. And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals,
play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct.

To dig deeper into how music engages the brain’s reward system, we designed a study to mimic online music purchasing. Our goal
was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it. We
used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our listeners’ preferences, which turned out to be indie and
electronic music, matching Montreal’s hip music scene. And we found that neural activity within the striatum — the reward-related
structure — was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend.

But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were
ultimately purchased compared with those that were not.

Why the auditory cortex? Some 50 years ago, Wilder Penfield, the famed neurosurgeon and the founder of the Montreal Neurological
Institute, reported that when neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory cortex while they were awake, they
would sometimes report hearing music. Dr. Penfield’s observations, along with those of many others, suggest that musical information
is likely to be represented in these brain regions. The auditory cortex is also active when we imagine a tune: think of the first four notes
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — your cortex is abuzz! This ability allows us not only to experience music even when it’s physically
absent, but also to invent new compositions and to reimagine how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation.

We also know that these areas of the brain encode the abstract relationships between sounds — for instance, the particular sound
pattern that makes a major chord major, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive neural responses from
similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a chord progression. This is akin to what
happens if you hear someone play a wrong note — easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music. These cortical circuits allow
us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our
lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the
music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard. So each act of listening to music may be
thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future. When we listen to music, these brain networks actively create
expectations based on our stored knowledge.

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want — or to
surprise us, perhaps even with something better.In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze patterns and yield
expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music
move us? When that answer is yes, there is little — in those moments of listening, at least — that we value more.