Big Ideas

The following is the text of a keynote address I gave at the Day Eight arts journalism conference entitled “The Crisis in Book Review.” Thank you. I’m delighted to be here, and also very honored to be following three people whose achievements and intellect I admire so much. The premise of this event we’re all enjoying here is that the book review is facing a crisis, and I have to make a confession. My original response when I was invited to deliver this keynote was “Only one crisis?” And then a few seconds later, I was like “I wonder which one they mean?” Now, I honestly can’t help my cynicism here. I’m Gen X, and we’re cynical about pretty much everything. I do of course understand that the crisis in question here is that there aren’t enough book reviews to go around for all the new books the world is making… but I get very suspicious whenever anybody invokes the idea of scarcity. I’m not sure that I actually believe in scarcity. I mean, yes, of course, sometimes, resource

In 1960, a Turkish immigrant named Erol Onaran arrived in the United States with a whopping $32 in his pocket and a fair bit of skill as a television repair person. Erol was a man full of energy and ideas and creativity, and all he wanted to do was make sure people were connected to sources of entertainment. That was his personal mission. He fixed every bit of electronic equipment he could, and he was very successful at it. His business grew tremendously for a long time, and people liked working with him. By the late 1970s, when videotapes became a thing, and his customers started asking him to fix their VCRs, Erol decided he could do more to achieve that personal mission. He bought a bunch of videos, put them on a rack in the corner of his repair shop, and invited his customers to rent them overnight, returning them the next day. They loved it so much that before long, video rentals became his primary business. By 1985, Erol’s Video was the nation’s largest privately-owned

Hey, playwrights: have you met this wonderful human being yet? (I’m being sarcastic.) TJ Davis is a young white male playwright who performs a character he created called “Juanito Bandito.” His work is pretty racist, as others have detailed in great depth. (Go read the links, if you like. I’ll be here when you get back.) Speaking as an artist, I want to say a few things. I happen to think it’s very important to protect the rights of artists to create whatever work they feel called to create. If we don’t protect those rights, we run the risk of losing them when, say, a totalitarian state comes along. So there’s that. But… …at the same time, I also believe that with rights come, as the saying goes, responsibilities. And I believe that artists have a responsibility to the communities in which they live and make art. How would I define that responsibility? I believe it’s our job to create art that promotes the well-being of the pe

America is a fiction we have all agreed to believe in for a while. It doesn’t actually exist outside of our minds and our behavior. By imagining the idea of America, we give the fiction power; if we ignored it, if we turned our collective attention away, it would cease to exist. By acting as if America is real—taking our hats off when we hear the National Anthem at baseball games, waving the stars and stripes and setting off fireworks on the fourth of July every year—we maintain the illusion that our country is a tangible thing. There is no “our country.” There are amber waves of grain, yes, and majestic purple mountains—they exist elsewhere on the planet, too, incidentally—but America is pretend. Money works the same way. It harnesses some desire inside of us for a shared abstract representation of value, but our thoughts about money are not, in fact, shared. It strikes me as nothing short of bewildering, in fact, given our different beliefs about value and fairness worl

This is a guest post from Michael Dove, the Artistic Director of Forum Theatre. It was initially distributed to the artistic directors, managing directors, and leaders of the DC theatre community, but it warrants wider distribution. I’ve reprinted it here with Michael’s blessing. Dear fellow theatre leaders: After several days of walking through a fog of shock, anger, depression, and sadness, I did what I do on most weekends: I went to the theatre. On Friday, I had the pleasure of seeing Natsu Onoda Power’s Wind Me Up, Maria, the first Go-Go musical, now playing at Georgetown University. It was the first time since the election that I was able to relax, experience true joy, and I even danced. But it was not escapist. The state and mood of the nation were firmly in my thoughts as I watched this young, diverse company of actors engage with the vibrancy and complexities of DC’s native music genre. The work made me laugh and sing all while engaging with the hard rea