CULTURE FILES // Fooling Around

Lions Don’t Eat Straw

Artists should stop censoring themselves and make the art they want to make

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

As Steven Pinker would remind us in books such as Enlightenment Now, we’re all much better off than nearly everyone else who has come before us in human history, but the dominant media narrative is that it’s never been worse. From both extreme progressives and extreme conservatives, we get some version of American carnage. I believe there is a way that we can acknowledge our complicated past—especially those in which families owned slaves or commandeered land from native populations—without allowing the actions of our ancestors to completely overshadow our possibilities in the present. We should, and must, find ways to row in the same direction occasionally if humankind is to exist at all in the future. //

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