Whose Dance Is It Anyway? Property, Copyright and the Commons. “Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a ‘tangible medium of expression’. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expansion of copyright protection shrinks the public domain. While copyright has become more important for dancers and choreographers who wish to control the appropriation of their work that is now made available to millions of end-users online, it also potentially restricts them from engaging in a dialog with other dancers or building on inspiring dance moves across communities. This paper investigates notions of property that rely on both the commons and individual personhood in the context of dance.”
An interview with Jean-Luc Nancy on literature, philosophy and the present.
What is life? Its vast diversity defies easy definition.
Is philosophy an art? John Gray reviews Witcraft by Jonathan Rée.
On readers relationship with fictional characters.
Sasa Stanisic reviews Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastasic.
Triangulating math, Mozart and Moby-Dick.
Awful but joyful. Review of the Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, which is on my reading list.
Avi Wigderson and László Lovász won the Abel Prize for their work developing complexity theory and graph theory, respectively, and for connecting the two fields.
Review of a biography of Philip Roth.
Review of a new English translation of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.
Decades-long quest reveals details of the proton’s inner antimatter.
Imaginary numbers may be essential for describing reality.
Odontoblast TRPC5 channels signal cold pain in teeth. "Teeth are composed of many tissues, covered by an inflexible and obdurate enamel. Unlike most other tissues, teeth become extremely cold sensitive when inflamed. The mechanisms of this cold sensation are not understood. Here, we clarify the molecular and cellular components of the dental cold sensing system and show that sensory transduction of cold stimuli in teeth requires odontoblasts."