Money in the abstract: the back of the new Norwegian 100 kroner bill, designed by Snøhetta (all images via norges-bank.no)
Links of interest from the past week:
Confessions of an Aesthete: “To be an aesthete in an idea-driven age is to run the risk of being dismissed as irrelevant by those who prefer ideas to beauty.”
Building Imaginary Cities: Fictional cities and fantastical architecture somehow seep into the real-life places we inhabit.
Hymn Book of Less-Than-Common Prayer: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is a masterpiece, as we all (should) know. But what makes it so?
Creative writing courses are killing western literature, claims Nobel judge: The professionalization of the job of writing cuts authors off from society; their work no longer represents real life.
That said, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Patrick Modiano: “For the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
From our pages:
The ambiguous witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The complicated legacy of the anti-Nazi theologian.