There is an important conception of philosophy that falls to this criticism.  Associated especially with earlier modern philosophers, particularly René Descartes, this conception sees philosophy as the essential foundation of the beliefs that guide our everyday life.  For example, I act as though there is a material world and other people who experience it as I do.   But how do I know that any of this is true?  Couldn’t I just be dreaming of a world outside my thoughts?  And, since (at best) I see only other human bodies, what reason do I have to think that there are any minds connected to those bodies?  To answer these questions, it would seem that I need rigorous philosophical arguments for my existence and the existence of other thinking humans.

Of course, I don’t actually need any such arguments, if only because I have no practical alternative to believing that I and other people exist.  As soon as we stop thinking weird philosophical thoughts, we immediately go back to believing what skeptical arguments seem to call into question.  And rightly so, since, as David Hume pointed out, we are human beings before we are philosophers.

But what Hume and, by our day, virtually all philosophers are rejecting is only what I’m calling the foundationalist conception of philosophy. Rejecting foundationalism means accepting that we have every right to hold basic beliefs that are not legitimated by philosophical reflection.  More recently, philosophers as different as Richard Rorty and Alvin Plantinga have cogently argued that such basic beliefs include not only the “Humean” beliefs that no one can do without, but also substantive beliefs on controversial questions of ethics, politics and religion.  Rorty, for example, maintained that the basic principles of liberal democracy require no philosophical grounding (“the priority of democracy over philosophy”).

If you think that the only possible “use” of philosophy would be to provide a foundation for beliefs that need no foundation, then the conclusion that philosophy is of little importance for everyday life follows immediately.  But there are other ways that philosophy can be of practical significance.

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking.  Religious believers, for example, are frequently troubled by the existence of horrendous evils in a world they hold was created by an all-good God.  Some of their trouble may be emotional, requiring pastoral guidance.  But religious commitment need not exclude a commitment to coherent thought. For instance, often enough believers want to know if their belief in God makes sense given the reality of evil.  The philosophy of religion is full of discussions relevant to this question.  Similarly, you may be an atheist because you think all arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious. But if you encounter, say, a sophisticated version of the cosmological argument, or the design argument from fine-tuning, you may well need a clever philosopher to see if there’s anything wrong with it.

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Read previous contributions to this series.

In addition to defending our basic beliefs against objections, we frequently need to clarify what our basic beliefs mean or logically entail. So, if I say I would never kill an innocent person, does that mean that I wouldn’t order the bombing of an enemy position if it might kill some civilians? Does a commitment to democratic elections require one to accept a fair election that puts an anti-democratic party into power?  Answering such questions requires careful conceptual distinctions, for example, between direct and indirect results of actions, or between a morality of intrinsically wrong actions and a morality of consequences. Such distinctions are major philosophical topics, of course, and most non-philosophers won’t be in a position to enter into high-level philosophical discussions.  But there are both non-philosophers who are quite capable of following such discussions and philosophers who enter public debates about relevant topics.

The perennial objection to any appeal to philosophy is that philosophers themselves disagree among themselves about everything, so that there is no body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can rely.  It’s true that philosophers do not agree on answers to the “big questions” like God’s existence, free will, the nature of moral obligation and so on.  But they do agree about many logical interconnections and conceptual distinctions that are essential for thinking clearly about the big questions.   Some examples: thinking about God and evil requires the key distinction between evil that is gratuitous (not necessary for some greater good) and evil that is not gratuitous; thinking about free will requires the distinction between a choice’s being caused and its being compelled; and thinking about morality requires the distinction between an action that is intrinsically wrong (regardless of its consequences) and one that is wrong simply because of its consequences.  Such distinctions arise from philosophical thinking, and philosophers know a great deal about how to understand and employ them.  In this important sense, there is body of philosophical knowledge on which non-philosophers can and should rely.

New York Times Gary Gutting

Normally, I wake in the Fife countryside, to the sound of my neighbour’s sheep and the occasional buzzard and, on one level, that is what most of my poetry is “about”: everyday experiences, the land, the lives of other animals, the light on a certain kind of winter’s day, in a specific Scottish place, the seemingly unremarkable details of the here and now. Yet whenever the question “What does poetry do?” or “What is it for?” is raised, I have no hesitation in replying that poetry is central to our culture, and that it is capable of being the most powerful and transformative of the arts.

There are poems that have, literally, changed my life, because they have changed the way I looked at and listened to the world; there are poems that, on repeated reading, have gradually revealed to me areas of my own experience that, for reasons both personal and societal, I had lost sight of; and there are poems that I have read over and over again, knowing they contained some secret knowledge that I had yet to discover, but refused to give up on. So, at the most basic level, poetry is important because it makes us think, it opens us up to wonder and the sometimes astonishing possibilities of language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline for re-engaging with a world we take too much for granted.

When the purveyors of bottom-line thinking call a mountain or a lake a “natural resource”, something to be merely exploited and used up, poetry reminds us that lakes and mountains are more than items on a spreadsheet; when a dictatorship imprisons and tortures its citizens, people write poems because the rhythms of poetry and the way it uses language to celebrate and to honour, rather than to denigrate and abuse, is akin to the rhythms and attentiveness of justice. Central to this attentiveness is the key ingredient of poetry, the metaphor, which Hannah Arendt defined as “the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about”. It’s that power to bring things together, to unify experience as “the music of what happens”, that the best poetry achieves.

Most of us feel that this is true of the great dead poets society of history, of Shakespeare and Milton, of Coleridge and Shelley and, of course, of TS Eliot, an American who re-envisioned and so renewed and enriched our idea of England. Yet I would argue that poetry is, or can be, as central to our experience now as it has ever been. To read “I Am Your Waiter Tonight And My Name Is Dmitri”, by the great contemporary American poet, Robert Hass, at the height of George W Bush’s xenophobic repudiation of “Old Europe”, was to be reminded not just of the injustice and futility of war, but also of the very richness and complexity of history that Bush sought to expunge.

The Wisconsin poet Nick Lantz’s collection, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, brings together the natural history of Pliny the Elder and the wittering of Donald Rumsfeld to extraordinary effect, forcing us to ask questions about how our vision of the world and our political attitudes are manipulated by the powers that be. Apparently personal, apolitical lyrics by Lucie Brock-Broido, say, or Alan Shapiro make us think again about the dynamics of our day-to-day relationships with other creatures, from spouses and children to the wild things that we keep forgetting are out there, where the suburban garden or the porch light ends.

All of these poets insinuate their way into our lives with their music and wit, but they stay on to make us think again about how we live and what we are capable of – just as poets have always done. Poets today are as challenging, both of public life and private accommodations, as Andrew Marvell was when he gently confronted Oliver Cromwell’s foreign policy in his “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”; or, in more intimately reflective mode, TS Eliot was, when he drew together and made immediate essential philosophical ideas about the basic facts of life – time, place, endurance, the difficult disciplines of love – in the Four Quartets. As much as it has ever done, poetry renews and deepens the gift that most surely makes us human: the imagination. And that is as essential to public as it is to private life, because the more imaginative we are, the more compassionate we become – and that, surely, is the highest virtue of all.

Telegraph John Burnside

Last summer a federal court denied Louboutin’s request that YSL be stopped from selling its red shoes pending resolution of Louboutin’s effort to enforce its federally registered Red Sole Mark. (In its opinion, the court said Louboutin’s trademark infringement claim was unlikely to succeed.) Now, the shoedown escalates to the appeals court.

The quirky lawsuit dramatizes the law’s ambivalence toward fashion. The law does not protect fashion design, but it does recognize the rights inherent in branding. Louboutin’s claim spotlights the pressure on fashion designers to frame their aesthetic choices as brand identifiers, and the legal contortions that result.

Those familiar with high-end fashion associate the red underside of a woman’s shoe with the Louboutin brand. And for good reason: Louboutin has invested plenty in that red sole and successfully linked the sole’s shade with the shoemaker. Since a main purpose of trademark law is to protect one’s investment in reputation, Louboutin’s sole-saving efforts are understandable.

But red; it’s a color. An interlocking LV on a Louis Vuitton handbag or a Nike swoosh on a sneaker is one thing, some say. But monopolizing a color … just doesn’t seem right.

As it turns out, however, the Supreme Court has previously held that a color alone could be a trademark, in a case about a solid green-gold color on pads used in dry cleaning press machines, because the color served to identify the maker of the product — and had no other function. Thus an important caveat is that if the color is a useful feature in a product — green for farm equipment or yellow for banana-flavored gum — it can’t be a trademark, even if it is source-identifying, because excluding competitors from a useful feature would be anti-competitive. Applying this logic, the judge in the Louboutin case suggested that particularly in fashion, a single color could not be a trademark. The judge reasoned that in fashion, color is always “functional” — meaning that color is a useful aesthetic feature to which all designers should have access.

The red elephant in the room is that though it is the artistic and creative core of the fashion industry, design is not protected qua design, but only as a symbol of who created it. Fashion designers find no comfort in the federal copyright statute, which protects authors and creators, but does not extend to “useful articles,” including apparel and shoes.

A pending Congressional bill may offer some copyright protection for fashion design, but until then, fashion, unlike other visual media such as film and painting, remains a realm in which copying is perfectly legal — unless a design is deemed a trademark, that is. The Burberry plaid design, for example, is legally protected because it identifies Burberry, while the design of a dress the plaid may adorn is not, no matter how artful or original. Hence the pressure to frame design features — like an eye-catching color or a pleasing plaid — as trademarks.

That brings us to the fashion Catch-22 that the red sole throws into relief: Trademark law does not protect design features that are “functional,” the meaning of which, it turns out, encompasses even aesthetic appeal. But in copyright law it is precisely the utilitarian and non-aesthetic aspect of apparel and shoes that leaves fashion design unprotected from copying. Fashion design is caught between opposing demands and exclusions, and snubbed from both ends.

It is unlikely a court will allow Louboutin to monopolize “red,” even if all that is claimed is placement on the sole. A trademark claim on the precise “Chinese Red” that Louboutin uses on its soles might be more palatable, but the company seemingly wants to trademark “red” rather than a particular shade of this color. (YSL’s shoes are not the same shade of red as Louboutin’s.) Still, YSL’s red soles are part of a red-all-over shoe design; arguably Louboutin’s soles are recognizable precisely because of the contrast between shoe and sole color.

It is time for Congress to address directly the fusion of practicality and beauty that makes fashion such a compelling medium of expression and a profitable creative industry, one that merits its own limited industry-specific protections. Otherwise, colorful as they are, lawsuits like the red sole case are likely to compound the uncertainty that results from the absence of statutory delineation of fashion design protection — and invites more lawsuits.

New York Times Jeannie Suk

Amid a clutter of 24-hour arc lights, gigantic cranes and dumper trucks, a behemoth is rising out of a field of churned mud on the outskirts of Chengdu in south-west China. Commuters skirt its vast perimeter fence on their way to the new metro link that cuts under the city. They barely glance at what looks like just another huge construction project in a cityscape that changes every month.

This project, though, is different. When finished later this year, its developers proudly boast, it will be the world’s largest standalone building. The New Century Global Centre is a leisure complex that will house two 1,000-room five-star hotels, an ice rink, a luxury Imax cinema, vast shopping malls and a 20,000-capacity indoor swimming pool with 400 metres of “coastline” and a fake beach the size of 10 football pitches complete with its own seaside village. Alongside will be another massive and futuristic structure, a contemporary arts centre designed by the award-winning Iraqi-born architect, Zaha Hadid.

The scale of the centre is a sign not just of the ambition of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, but a potential vision of the future. Last week Chinese authorities announced that for the first time more than half of the country’s population were living in cities, 690.79 million, an increase of 21 million, compared to 656.56 million rural dwellers. The new urban-rural balance was a benchmark attained by the UK in the late 19th century and the US in the first decades of the last century – in 1800, only 3% of the world’s people lived in cities. But the scale and speed of urbanisation across the developing world today are unprecedented – throwing up a string of megacities, from Jakarta to Istanbul, São Paulo to Cairo. Poor rural families flooding into the world’s urban population centres bring challenges that have never before been seen – nor met.

Chengdu made the headlines in Britain late last year when it exported two pandas to Scotland, and it is developing a reputation as the centre of Sichuan’s prized cuisine. But few in the west have paid much attention to the astonishing rise of Chengdu, despite a population (including its rural hinterland) of more than 14 million and its evident economic power and growing sense of self-confidence. Few have heard much either of cities like Ghaziabad, Surat or Faridabad in India, or of Toluca in Mexico, Palembang in Indonesia or Chittagong, the Bangladeshi port. Or of Beihai, another Chinese city on the northern coast. But this is likely to change. Each of these cities is among the fastest-growing settlements in the world. Their cumulative growth is set to usher in a new era of city living, changing the face of the planet. Beihai, which already has 1.3 million inhabitants, is set to double its population in seven years. The municipality of Chengdu will reach 20 million. Ghaziabad, now itself part of the urban sprawl of the Indian capital Delhi, is already home to nearly four million people.

Crucially, though experts estimate that the number of megacities of more than 10 million inhabitants will double over the next 10 to 20 years, it is these less well-known cities, particularly in south and east Asia, that will see the biggest growth. Predicting what the new era will bring is taxing economists, senior businessmen, security experts and strategists across the world.

Optimists see a new network of powerful, stable and prosperous city states, each bigger than many small countries, where the benefits of urban living, the relative ease of delivering basic services compared to rural zones and new civic identities combine to raise living standards for billions. Pessimists see the opposite: a dystopic future where huge numbers of people fight over scarce resources in sprawling, divided, anarchic “non-communities” ravaged by disease and violence.

Nowhere is this more evident than in India, where years of underinvestment, chaotic development and rapid population growth have combined with poor governance and outdated financial systems to threaten an urban disaster.

In the middle of last week, Prakash Kumar spent a morning helping to push a broken-down van loaded with bags of cement up a flyover in southern Delhi. He was happy to do so, he told the Observer. A recent immigrant to the capital from the poverty-stricken state of Bihar, the 24-year-old had picked up work helping a relative – another migrant – on a building site. For the equivalent of £3 a day, he was unloading emergency supplies of construction materials for contractors busy putting up flats for the new Indian middle classes. His dream is to get a job as a security guard, which pays around the same but simply involves sitting on a stool guarding a shop at night. For shelter, he shares a room in an illegal slum tenement with a dozen other labourers.

“At least there’s work,” he said. “In my village there is nothing. I send the money home to my family and we can eat.”

The story of India’s urbanisation – though slower than that of China or many other developing countries – is made up of hundreds of millions of variants on Kumar’s story. Some 290 million people were living in cities in India in 2001, a figure that rose to 340 million in 2008 and is set to reach 590 million, around 40% of the population, by 2030. By that year, business consultant McKinsey and Co predicts, there will be 68 Indian cities of more than a million people, 13 with more than 4 million and six megacities with populations of 10 million or more. More than 30 million people will live in Mumbai and 26 million in Delhi.

It is far from sure that India’s notoriously chaotic and inefficient systems of government can cope. At current rates of investment, McKinsey says, India’s already congested cities will face gridlock with only a quarter of the necessary trains and metros and a severe shortage of water. Many inhabitants will have no drinking water at all and up to 80% of sewage will go untreated. In all more than a trillion dollars needs to be invested in infrastructure projects alone, it estimates.

According to Dr Rumi Aijaz, of the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, it is unlikely that this can be achieved. “Our urban areas are in a raw form. All the basics are at a very low level. And the Indian state has been trying for a very long time to address this but a lack of capacity and endemic corruption has meant not much success,” Aijaz said. “The future is bleak. The situation is going to worsen.”

The new Chinese cities, too, have their problems – though arguably less severe than those in south Asia. For every pound Indian authorities invest in urban infrastructure, their Chinese counterparts spend seven. This, however, is still insufficient to cope with the speed of urbanisation. Chengdu has become a test case for how China resolves these varied challenges. It has been named as one of China’s “pilot reform regions”, giving local authorities extraordinary powers to experiment.

The issue is becoming ever more pressing – rural unrest over continuing poverty as well as land seizures due to voracious development is widely reported, even in China’s heavily censored media. Chengdu’s mayor, Ge Honglin, claims that the city has avoided some of the problems associated with migration into the cities by encouraging families to stay in the countryside. “The first thing I did was to improve the conditions – schools, shops, garbage collection, the sewage system. We had to cut the gap between rural and urban areas. If people could have a brighter future in the countryside, they’d stay there. So we’re not seeing people swarm into the city… Instead there are people in the city considering moving to the country.”|

Chengdu modified the household registration system in use across the country, known as hukou, which previously prevented rural migrants from registering as city dwellers and benefiting from the city’s welfare services. But at the same time it has extended such services into the surrounding countryside. Farmers as well as urban workers can now receive pension insurance, allowing women over 55 and men over 60 to claim a rudimentary pension once they have paid premiums for at least 15 years.

Hundreds of new schools have been built in the villages surrounding Chengdu; successful headteachers from city schools are being recruited to move into the countryside, while partnerships between struggling rural schools and the best urban schools are being set up.

The motivation for all these policies is clear – to persuade millions of rural families around Chengdu that they have an economic stake in China’s rapid growth. Part of the strategy involves pouring resources into satellite towns and villages, and creating thousands of new rural communities where families can be rehoused. “Chengdu is the only super-large central city that has narrowed the urban-rural income gap alongside rapid economic growth in China,” Ge says.

He has also taken a zero-tolerance approach to urban squalor – a policy facilitated by China’s authoritarian culture – which involves patrols with mobile phones and cameras scouring the city reporting broken advertising hoardings, missing manhole covers and other minor problems. “You can barely see a beggar in Chengdu,” Ge said. “We have a special system for monitoring them, and it works. Beggars are taken to the assistance centre, where they are given food and shelter and money to take them back to their home. If I say there are no more than 10 beggars on the street you will think there’s some sort of tyranny, but there isn’t. We’re trying to solve their problems.”

Even if the demands for power, sanitation and security can be met, however, the new cities, whether of 30 million or five million inhabitants, present a cultural challenge: how to establish a sense of community in huge and complex societies. In one recent book, The Spirit of Cities, two political theorists argued that the distinctive spirit of the city states of ancient Greece should be rediscovered. Daniel A Bell, of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Avner de-Shalit, of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, argue that “civicism”, or attachment to a city and the assertion of its local identity, brings numerous benefits, ranging from curbing excesses of nationalism to potentially sparking economic renaissance. “We say that though the scale is different compared to ancient cities, modern cities can still express an identity,” Bell said last week.

In Chengdu, there is abundant evidence of the city’s efforts to preserve a sense of cultural identity amid bewildering change. Ancient districts that were knocked down have been lovingly recreated to house market stalls selling highly prized Sichuan delicacies. They are packed with locals, in stark contrast to the cavernous and empty modern malls on the outskirts of the city. Last autumn’s Chengdu biennale, an exuberant exhibition of modern art and architecture filled with tributes to traditional techniques and rural themes, was housed in a refurbished Soviet-built factory complete with original murals of workers and peasants, an ironic reference amid the throngs of students and children who throng the cafes nearby.

There are few such initiatives in India but a sense of community among city dwellers is nonetheless often present. Inhabitants of Mumbai can be fiercely proud of their city, particularly when it is compared to Delhi. Smaller “metros” such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad also have well-defined identities, reinforced by local languages and cultures as well as a range of local media.

For Prakash Kumar, the simple fact of making a living in the capital, however basic, is a source of pride. “The rest of my family will come and join me one day,” he said.

This is why the story does not just end with finding novel treatments, said Dr David Allen, 54, a pioneer in the field of infectious diseases here.

Cancer patients today, for instance, have better chances of survival thanks to stronger chemotherapy drugs. Now, more than 60 per cent of breast cancer patients can live for another 20 years. In the 1990s, only about 40 per cent would have done so.

‘But the survival comes with consequences,’ said Dr Allen, an American who came to Singapore in 1989 at the request of the Health Ministry to help lay the foundation for the field of infectious diseases – something that was almost non-existent at that time.

One of the side effects of such cancer therapy is infections, such as of the mouth, skin, and lungs. This is because cancer drugs can suppress the ability of the bone marrow to make white blood cells, which are crucial in fending off infections.

‘As a result, compared to 20 years ago, patients are sicker; their problems more complex,’ said Dr Allen.

He drew parallels to how more people are surviving traffic accidents, which were often fatal in the past as emergency care was not as efficient then.

‘Now people can survive the accident. But we deal with other consequences – bleeding, infection, and blood clots,’ he said. ‘It’s the beauty of modern medicine, but also the cost of modern medicine.’

Dr Allen, who in 1992 was the first to helm an all-new infectious diseases department at the Communicable Disease Centre (CDC) in Tan Tock Seng Hospital, trained the first generation of infectious diseases doctors in Singapore.

Associate Professor Leo Yee Sin, who runs the CDC now, was among Dr Allen’s first batch of medical trainees.

He returned to his practice in Texas in 1994 but visits Singapore regularly to teach.

He is in town to lecture at the National University Hospital, Tan Tock Seng Hospital and Alexandra Hospital, as well as to collect an award for his contributions.

The inaugural Monteiro Award is named after the late Professor Ernest Monteiro, whose research on the polio vaccine helped to eliminate the disease here.

Dr Allen received the award last Sunday from Prof Monteiro’s son, Dr Edmund Monteiro, 78, also an infectious diseases doctor.

It is conferred by the College of Physicians Singapore, on a grant from the Society of Infectious Diseases (Singapore).

Modern medicine, however effective, has yet to stem most infectious diseases. Dr Allen recalled that dengue fever, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids were some infections he dealt with in the 1990s. All are still in the news.

Last year, dengue hit record epidemic levels, with more than 4,600 infections registered at the end of the peak transmission period in October.

And in November last year, it was reported that there were more new cases of tuberculosis among Singaporeans and foreigners, with the year’s final tally expected to exceed 2010′s total of 1,478 cases among residents.

Meanwhile, efforts to raise awareness and acceptance of HIV are still being stepped up, with advocacy group Action for Aids rolling out a mobile van last month to encourage more people to get tested.

The first-line treatment for many infections has remained the same over the years, said Dr Allen.

What has changed is simply the range and types of tools used to tackle the diseases. For example, doctors now have more drugs to use as second- and third-line treatments, he said.

‘If we have problems, failures, side effects… we have drugs available now that we didn’t have back then.’

Here, another kind of cost is incurred: investment in education. Doctors have to be properly trained on how – and when – to administer treatments.

‘Just because you have a tool doesn’t mean you should use the tool,’ he said. ‘You still have to be selective – to ask yourself when is it helpful, and when it doesn’t really help any more.

Still, the field of infectious diseases – which developed in the US only in the 1960s – has come far.

In the early 1990s, the concept was still quite new in Singapore, and doctors had to explain to people what it entailed, said Dr Allen.

He recalled how he had to treat a patient who had been bitten by a crocodile. Maggots had covered the wound by the time the man was admitted to hospital. The medical team opted not to remove the maggots immediately as they eat bacteria and dead tissue.

‘Actually, it’s not a bad thing – the maggots will probably do a better job than us,’ said Dr Allen. ‘But his family was rather disturbed.’

At that time, a team of only seven doctors covered the whole island as far as infectious diseases were concerned.

Singapore now has 45 registered infectious diseases specialists working in hospitals and clinics.

The Health Ministry also collates and publishes data on infectious diseases on its website weekly.

Medical care of infectious diseases here is now ‘superb’, noted Dr Allen. Research efforts have also been heartening, he added.

Universities, hospitals and scientists at the Biopolis are among the many institutions studying infections.

He looks forward to more research studies in the field, especially now that there are more diagnostic and therapeutic methods available.

‘It’s both easier and harder to practise now,’ he said. ‘Easier in that sometimes when we run into dead ends, we have more options to turn to.’

The difficulty for doctors, on the other hand, lies in picking the best way to treat a patient.

Ongoing investigations are required to compare which methods are better, he said.

‘There will never be sufficient research – whether it’s on astrophysics, or how to bake a chicken properly, or in dealing with infectious diseases,’ he joked.

‘We can always do better.’

The Straits Times Poon Chian Hui

Kodak’s decision to file for bankruptcy protection is a sad, though not unexpected, milestone for an American corporate icon that pioneered consumer photography and dominated the film market for decades, but ultimately failed to adapt to the digital revolution.

Unlike fellow corporate titans IBM, Xerox, and Corning Glass, Kodak was unsuccessful in its quest to reinvent itself in the face of a rapidly changing economy. Rather, Kodak’s demise mirrored that of Blockbuster and Borders, two other giants that saw new, innovative digital upstarts crowd them out of the marketplace.

On Thursday, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The company said it has received a $950 million line of credit from Citigroup while it reorganizes its business with a view toward emerging from bankruptcy in 2013.

Although many commentators attribute Kodak’s downfall to “complacency,” that explanation is “the easy answer,” one that doesn’t acknowledge the lengths to which the company went to reinvent itself, according to Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School who co-authored an influential case study about the company. Decades ago, Kodak anticipated that digital photography would overtake film — and in fact, Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975 — but in a fateful decision, the company chose put its new discovery on the backburner to focus on its legacy film business.

It wasn’t that Kodak was oblivious to the future, Henderson said, but rather that it failed to execute on a strategy to confront it. By the time the company realized its mistake, it was too late.

“Kodak is an example of a firm that was very much aware that they had to adapt, and spent a lot of money trying to do so, but ultimately failed,” Henderson says. “Large companies have a difficult time transitioning into new markets because there is a temptation to put existing assets into the new businesses.”

(More: Getting Kodak To Focus)

Henderson contrasts Kodak’s experience with that of two other American corporate icons, IBM and Corning Glass, both of which recreated themselves to adapt to new market conditions. IBM’s decision to jettison its personal computer business and invest heavily in consulting and services laid the foundation for Big Blue’s recent renaissance. Corning, meanwhile, has become one of the largest manufacturers of glass for flat-screen televisions and cell-phones. It’s a far cry from that company’s start as a producer of railroad signals, Henderson points out.

Although Kodak anticipated the inevitable rise of digital photography, its corporate culture was too rooted in the successes of the past for it to make the clean break necessary to fully embrace the future, Robert Burley, an associate professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, told Bloomberg. “They were a company stuck in time,” Burley said. “Their history was so important to them, this rich century-old history when they made a lot of amazing things and a lot of money along the way. Now their history has become a liability.”

Founded in 1880 by George Eastman, Kodak became closely identified with the city of Rochester, New York, where it was based. At its peak in the 1980s, Kodak employed 62,000 people there, according to a recent must-read New York Times story about the evolution of Rochester’s economy. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 7,000. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, Kodak closed 13 film plants and 130 photo labs, and slashed its workforce by 50,000, according to Reuters.

(More: Kodak’s Photo Op)

Kodak’s demise over the last several decades was dramatic. In 1976, the company commanded 90% of the market for photographic film and 85% of the market for cameras, according to the case study Henderson co-authored. But the 1980s brought new competition from Japanese film company Fuji Photo, which undercut Kodak by offering lower prices for film and photo supplies. Kodak’s decision not to pursue the role of official film for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was a major miscalculation, according to Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik. “The bid went instead to Fuji, which exploited its sponsorship to win a permanent foothold in the marketplace,” Hiltzik wrote in an excellent piece detailing Kodak’s struggles.

In 1991, Kodak introduced the photo CD, which allowed consumers to view digital photographs on their computers, but that launch was a modest, incremental step for a company that needed to move much more decisively. The company introduced several pocket-sized digital cameras in the late-1990s, culminating with the launch of its EasyShare device in 2001. But by then, the digital camera market had become highly competitive, with rival device manufacturers battling each other for increasingly slim profit margins.

And of course, over the last several years, the rise of the smartphone has further transformed the market, as consumers increasingly eschew low-cost digital cameras, preferring to use feature-rich iPhones and Google Android devices to take photos and videos. Kodak, once a blue-chip American company, had been left in the dust.

Time Sam Gustin

You often hear it said that “museums of art are our new churches”: in other words, in a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. It’s an intriguing idea, part of the broader ambition that culture should replace scripture, but in practice art museums often abdicate much of their potential to function as new churches (places of consolation, meaning, sanctuary, redemption) through the way they handle the collections entrusted to them. While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem unable to frame them in a way that links them powerfully to our inner needs.

The problem is that modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters, because modernist aesthetics (in which curators are trained) is so deeply suspicious of any hint of an instrumental approach to culture. To have an answer anyone could grasp as to the question of why art matters is too quickly viewed as “reductive”. We have too easily swallowed the modernist idea that art that aims to change or help or console its audience must by definition be “bad art” – Soviet art is routinely trotted out here as an example – and that only art that wants nothing of us can be good. Hence the all-too-frequent question with which we leave the modern museum of art: what did that mean?

Why should this veneration of ambiguity continue? Why should confusion be a central aesthetic emotion? Is an emptiness of intent on the part of an artwork really a sign of its importance?

Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to teach us how to live, what to love and what to be afraid of. Such art is extremely simple at the level of its purpose, however complex and subtle it is at the level of its execution. Christian art amounts to a range of geniuses saying such incredibly basic but extremely vital things as: “Look at that picture of Mary if you want to remember what tenderness is like”; “Look at that painting of the cross if you want a lesson in courage”; “Look at that Last Supper to train yourself not to be a coward and a liar”. The crucial point is that the simplicity of the message implies nothing whatsoever about the quality of the work itself. Instead of challenging instrumentalism by citing the case of Soviet art, we could more convincingly defend it with reference to Mantegna and Bellini.

This leads to a suggestion: what if modern museums of art kept in mind the example of the didactic function of Christian art, in order once in a while to reframe how they presented their collections? Would it ruin a Rothko to highlight for an audience the function that Rothko himself declared that he hoped his art would have: that of allowing the viewer a moment of communion around an echo of the suffering of our species?

Try to imagine what would happen if modern secular museums took the example of churches more seriously. What if they too decided that art had a specific purpose – to make us a bit more sane, or a little bit wiser and kinder – and tried to use the art in their possession to prompt us to be so? Perhaps art shouldn’t be “for art’s sake”, one of the most misunderstood, unambitious and sterile of all aesthetic slogans: why couldn’t art be, as it was in religious eras, more explicitly for something?

Modern art museums typically lead us into galleries set out under headings such as “the 19th century” and “the Northern Italian School”, which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. A more fertile indexing system might group together artworks from across genres and eras according to our inner needs. A walk through a museum of art should amount to a structured encounter with a few of the things that are easiest for us to forget and most essential and life-enhancing to remember.

The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our art museums so that collections can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as, for centuries, they served those of theology. Curators should attempt to put aside their deep-seated fears of instrumentalism and once in a while co-opt works of art to an ambition of helping us to get through life. Only then would museums be able to claim that they had properly fulfilled the excellent but as yet elusive ambition of in part becoming substitutes for churches in a rapidly secularising society.

Guardian Alain de Botton

Sean Carter, who performs under the name Jay-Z, has apparently vowed never again to use the word bitch in the wake of the birth of his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. And while I celebrate and congratulate his new fatherhood, this vow didn’t impress me.

It doesn’t begin to address his role in contributing to and profiting from the global power of a hyper-sexist brand of hip-hop masculinity. I need to hear quite a bit more about how he feels about this legacy and its impact on millions of black girls and boys before getting all teary-eyed.

Sure, hip-hop didn’t invent sexism, nor has it been the only musical genre to profit from promoting it. The vast territory that is popular music is a treasure trove of sexist ideas and images. And it is also true that racist, rightwing critics have targeted hip-hop as a way to continue the demonisation of black men while remaining silent on countless other sexist images, sounds and stories that define US culture.

As I noted in The Hip Hop Wars, just because your enemy is wrong, it doesn’t make you right. It is quite true that hip-hop has played a starring role in making sexist ideas sexy, visible and funky. Through the power of black music, style, swagger and lyrical creativity, Jay-Z and many other highly successful rappers (e.g, Snoop Dog, 50 Cent and Lil’ Wayne) have expanded the visibility and value of aggressively sexist lyrics. And, frankly, if you want to find openly celebrated sexism against black women, there is no richer contemporary source than commercial, mainstream hip-hop.

This hasn’t happened because commercially powerful artists have randomly or dutifully dropped a sexist word here or there to punctuate an infectious beat. Whole identities in countless songs rely on excessively sexist behaviour and name-calling to define the protagonist’s power and importance.

More than in any other genre in the history of black music, commercially celebrated hip-hop swagger depends on a brand of manhood that consistently defines black women as disrespected objects. And fans of all racial background, but especially young white males, who make up the bulk of US consumers, eat it up.

Black women know much about the brutality of colonialism, racism, economic exploitation and incarceration and their targeted impact on young black men. In the interest of protecting black men and boys from the extraordinary violence they face, many women have spoken out on behalf of men and remained silent about the violence done to women. They worry that naming their own suffering will add to black male suffering. But the forces aligned against black men roll on anyway, don’t they? And, as Audre Lorde so powerfully reminded us, “your silence won’t protect you”.

Some members of the hip-hop generation have spoken up. Some young women have courageously responded in protest; and films Daphne Valerius’s The Souls of Black Girls and Byron Hurt’s Beyond Beats and Rhymes challenge fans on the subject. But the biggest players in commercial hip-hop – the artists and the major corporations that promote and distribute them – have shielded themselves from sustained engagement and accountability.

A progressive, feminist, anti-racist community is not born, it is made. Through widespread exchange of ideas about how these injustices are perpetuated we learn why it is in all of our interests to fight for justice for all. This is why direct engagement and accountability matters so much. It should not be about finger pointing, or separating “them” from “us”. Part of the power of sexism and racist sexism is their capacity to seem so normal they almost disappear from view: they recruit us all into participation even when we know better.

But at the same time, we cannot continue to defend or silently condone commercial mainstream hip-hop’s hefty contribution to the hostility and disrespect endured by black women. To do so is not to defend black men or hip-hop; it is to defend sexism against black women.

Guardian Tricia Rose

But maybe you don’t care about all of that. Maybe politics bores you, maybe technical details make your eyes glaze over. Here’s why you should care anyway: the proposed law that would result from Sopa and Pipa will only work if you are put under 24-hour digital surveillance.

The old media firms in the US aren’t out to get you personally, of course – they don’t really care about you in particular. What they dislike about you is your willingness to share things with your friends, and with the world at large. Sopa/Pipa would allow private companies to assert that a foreign site is “dedicated to theft of US property”. Once a US media firm had made such an accusation, they could then black out the domain name of the accused site, so that if a user typed ReallyEvil.co.uk into their browser, nothing would happen (all of this could be based on an accusation: Sopa and Pipa seem to regard the niceties of a trial as an undue burden).

The proposed blackout wouldn’t remove the site itself from the internet, of course, it would just make the domain name inert. This is where Sopa and Pipa really get scary. They don’t just propose making US media firms into judge, jury and executioner, they propose forcing every site on the internet to pitch in on the proposed censorship and, critically, they imagine punishing not just the original sites but anyone else who doesn’t censor them well enough.

The scary bit of legalese here is the idea that the law would apply not just to actual copyright violations (the nominal goal of the law) but to any site that was “facilitating the activities” of copyright infringement, a term nowhere defined but vague enough to include mentioning the existence of such sites, which is enough to make them findable. Like a fast-spreading virus, the proposed censorship moves outwards from the domain name system, to include any source of public web content in the US.

If the phrase “any source of public web content” seems like a dry detail, substitute the name of your favourite web publisher: you. The US is, for the moment at least, the world’s premier host of sites that support user-generated material – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, Reddit, on and on. And under the proposed law, every one of those sites would have to take steps to prevent publishers, which is to say people, which is to say you, from helping anyone find out about the existence of sites the US media firms don’t like. And since the law doesn’t require a private company to provide any advance notice before the blacklisting, these sites will be forced to spy on their users, in advance and all the time, to make sure you are not talking about sites media firms in the US do not want you to talk about, even if you are not a US citizen.

Sopa and Pipa are, quite simply, an attempt to create a privatised form of international censorship, and because the censorship would have to be nearly total to be effective, they would have a profound and chilling effect on any form of public conversation among ordinary citizens. It would render the internet a place where the only content to be seen or heard or read is produced by professionals, with the rest of use relegated to the role of pure consumption.

As Congress continues to push the bills through, this side-effect of a “consumption-only” internet is starting to look like the goal of the bills in the first place.

Guardian Clay Shirky

The bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate, are backed by major media companies and are mostly intended to curtail the illegal downloading and streaming of TV shows and movies online. But the tech industry fears that, among other things, they will give media companies too much power to shut down sites that they say are abusing copyrights.

The legislation has jolted technology leaders, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, who are not accustomed to having their free-wheeling online world come under attack.

One response is Wednesday’s protest, which will direct anyone visiting Google and many other Web sites to pages detailing the tech industry’s opposition to the bills. Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit organization, is going further than most sites by actually taking material offline — no doubt causing panic among countless students who have a paper due.

It said the move was meant to spark greater public opposition to the bills, which could restrict its freedom to publish.

“For the first time, it’s very clear that legislation could have a direct impact on the industry’s ability to do business,” said Jessica Lawrence, the managing director of New York Tech Meetup, a trade organization with 20,000 members that has organized a protest rally in Manhattan on Wednesday. “This has been a wake-up call.”

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said that the technology industry, which has birthed large businesses like Google, Facebook and eBay, is much more powerful than it used to be.

“This is the first real test of the political strength of the Web, and regardless of how things go, they are no longer a pushover,” said Professor Wu, who is the author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” He added, “The Web taking a stand against one of the most powerful lobbyers and seeming to get somewhere is definitely a first.”

Under the proposed legislation, if a copyright holder like Warner Brothers discovers that a foreign site is focused on offering illegal copies of songs or movies, it could seek a court order that would require search engines like Google to remove links to the site and require advertising companies to cut off payments to it.

Internet companies fear that because the definitions of terms like “search engine” are so broad in the legislation, Web sites big and small could be responsible for monitoring all material on their pages for potential violations — an expensive and complex challenge.

They say they support current law, which requires Web sites with copyright-infringing content to take it down if copyright holders ask them to, leaving the rest of the site intact. Google, which owns YouTube and other sites, received five million requests to remove content or links last year, and it says it acts in less than six hours if it determines that the request is legitimate.

The major players supporting the legislation, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America, say those measures are not enough to protect intellectual property. They emphasize that their primary targets are foreign Web sites that sell counterfeit goods and let people stream and download music and video at no charge — sites that are now largely out of reach of United States law enforcement. And they are fighting against what they characterize as gimmicks and distortions by Internet companies opposed to the bills.

With talk of censorship and loss of Internet freedom, “the current debate has nothing to do with the substance of the bills,” David Hirschmann, who leads the Chamber of Commerce’s initiative on intellectual property, said in an interview. “We will certainly use every tool in our toolbox to make sure members of Congress know what’s in these bills.”

With financial resources that few other groups can match, the chamber is one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying forces and has shown the ability to alter Congressional debate on its own.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and author the Protect IP Act, accused opponents Tuesday of trying to “stoke fear” through tactics like the Wikipedia blackout. “Protecting foreign criminals from liability rather than protecting American copyright holders and intellectual property developers is irresponsible, will cost American jobs, and is just wrong,” he said in a statement.

Opponents of the legislation have clearly seized the momentum in the debate. Their protests have gained traction in that key provisions were stripped out of one bill and the Obama administration has raised concerns. Legislators have already agreed to delay or drop one ire-inducing component of the bills, Domain Name System blocking, which would prevent access to sites that were found to have illegal content.

A total of 115 companies and organizations have lobbyists working on the antipiracy bills, spending millions of dollars to sway the outcome, according to federal disclosure records. They include corporate and technology giants on both sides of the legislation, with entertainment groups like News Corporation and the Recording Industry Association of America backing it and Internet firms like Google and Facebook raising concerns about it.

The largest advocates for the bills disagree with the tech industry’s main rallying cry, which is the notion that they will hurt the average Internet user or interfere with their online activities.

“The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social network sites,” said Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and a primary sponsor of the House bill.

Most people in the tech world agree that the problem of piracy needs to be addressed. But they say their main concern is that the tech industry had little influence on the language of the legislation, which is still in flux and so broadly worded that it is not entirely clear how Internet businesses will be affected. Big Internet companies say the bills could prevent entire Web sites from appearing in search results — even if the sites operate legally and most content creators want their videos or music to appear there.

“It shouldn’t apply to U.S. Web sites, but any company with a server overseas or a domain name overseas could be at risk,” said Andrew McLaughlin, vice president at Tumblr, a popular blogging service.

Mr. McLaughlin said the fear is that on large and diverse Web communities like Tumblr, any user who uploads an unauthorized clip from a movie or an unreleased track from an album is putting the whole company in the line of fire.

In November, Tumblr rigged a tool that “censored” the page its users see when they log into the site, explained the legislation and routed them to contact information for their representatives in Congress. The stunt resulted in 80,000 calls to legislators in a three-day period. Mr. McLaughlin said the company was planning a similar approach for Wednesday.

Some who oppose the bill, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online rights group, see a bright spot in a potential compromise called the OPEN Act, which would provide for the International Trade Commission to judge cases of copyright or trademark infringement. If the commission found that a foreign site was largely devoted to piracy, it could compel payment processors and online advertising companies to stop doing business with it.

Silicon Valley has championed companies that provide alternatives to piracy, like Spotify and Netflix. And the industry says that the problem could be solved by letting it do what it does best — innovating.

“It’s something that could be solved using technology through collaboration with these start-ups,” said Ms. Lawrence of New York Tech Meetup.

New York Times Jenna Wortham