Jason Heilman

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

"Local. Trusted. Defunded." is featured on the GBH Mural in Boston, Mass., on July 18, 2025.

Federal funding is gone.
But we're not going anywhere.

The End of Public Radio Music? Bob Boilen writes about the importance of public radio music amid looming cuts.

"More than 23 mill listeners tune in to 687 public radio music stations. It would affect almost all programming, incl AAA stations with genres such as independent rock, bluegrass, folk, jazz, gospel, country, soul, hip-hop, local music. 96% of all classical music is played on public radio stations."

No there isn't.

It Never Rains (In Southern Amazonia)

Imagine being in charge of the Enterprise laundry that week.

The Expanse except for Amos.

I'm a fan of Weinberg's op. 18 piano quintet. An interesting contrast with Shostakovich.

I bet Disney would pay real money for a Pope Lando II.

this whole administration is like when they shut off the containment unit in ‘ghostbusters’

It never ceases to amaze me how noisy commercial classical recordings can be. So many birds. The Tokyo String Quartet has a full-on police chase going on in the background of one of their more recent Beethoven records.

I did not plan it that way - I just felt like hearing this new recording today!

And as it happens, I'm playing Jeneba Kanneh-Mason's new recording of Price's Fantasie Negre No. 1 right this instant on wpr.org

Okay, this is my newest very very favorite meme.

Playing the violin concerto by Amanda Röntgen-Maier on today's radio show. This is definitely a composer we should be hearing more from.

My whole thing here has been less about teaching and more about what the students are able to fall back on, 10 and 20 years after college.

I agree about the value of processes of inquiry in teaching! I'm just starting to think there might be a longer-term value in a canon for the student after graduation. Especially as I see our society growing less and less curious over the past couple of decades.

It’s amazing to find out at this late date how much the rule of law depended on people simply deciding, on a voluntary, daily basis, not to break the law.

I would ordinarily support that, but I feel like that's what we've tried to do for a while, and here we are. I still think the lack of a common frame of reference is going to be a problem.

There's also a strong push from a certain wing to make college even more explicitly about job skills, and if you're right, that will build an even bigger anti-academia backlash.

I'm talking about on the classroom level.

There's that, too. But we don't really promote the whole American dream thing *in* college.

Maybe. But we also haven't really tried to create a new canon (what with the aforementioned difficulties and all) as fervently as we've problematized it.

I also think some intellectually dishonest figures have latched onto that problematization and are using it destructively.

Oh, I think the canon should be renegotiated and evolve as our culture changes. The canon I was taught was a snapshot of a particular moment in time, but that moment has changed.

But I'm really arguing that it doesn't matter what the canon is as long as we all have a common frame of reference.

I don't think they're disappointed there's no canon. You have to be taught that is a canon in the first place. I am however arguing that students heading off into their own specific intellectual directions without a common frame of reference can be bad.

Please be more specific: Why what?

I'm really talking about the intellectual situation of people currently in their 20s and 30s. Symphony orchestras and other entities measured by @bachtrack.com have their own pressures, usually imposed by middle-aged donors who remember the canon they were taught and are trying to (re-)impose it.

I absolutely recognize the problem of picking a new canon. It's hard to imagine even trying to do it. I'm just pointing out that not doing it has had ramifications of its own. Bad ones.

The thing is, racism and sexism and transphobia have been massive problems since day one in this country. The current anti-intellectualism we're seeing has a new wrinkle: Younger people who don't value academia and have no qualms about blowing it up and replacing it with something different.

Are you saying that academia has imposed the canon on students within the past 20 years with the same intensity that it did on people our age and older?