Cultural Capital: Goodbye and Hello
Editor’s Note: This was the final article published on our prior website, Cultural Weekly.
How should a society define value?
Our answer to this question has always been: Through its cultural capital. The accumulation of creative arts and sciences, poetry and design, learning and the transmission of knowledge, the work of writers and musicians and dancers.
It’s the cultural capital of society that endures, spreads, inspires. And at a time when hope seems in short supply, it’s cultural capital we need to enhance.
Which is why this is Cultural Weekly’s last edition.
Don’t be alarmed. Next week we will become Cultural Daily.
Our purpose is to expand cultural capital. The worlds we live in — the large world and each of our smaller worlds — urgently, urgently, need response, reflection, reckoning, readjustment, creative action. As a reader, you should not have to wait a week to discover what our brilliant contributors are saying right now. Because our contributors want to — have to — do it today.
Daily.
Developing our new site has been a long road and the past couple of months have been a big lift. An insane lift. We are a scrappy and underfunded non-profit. We don’t have a million dollars to make a change like this. We’re doing it with whatever we have been able to scrape together. (By the way, donations are most welcome!) When I started Cultural Weekly 10 years ago, I thought it would be a blog. Then additional writers asked if they could guest-post, and we turned it into a digital magazine. A few years later we formed the non-profit Next Echo Foundation to support and expand the work.
Looking back at what we’ve done collectively: Wow! More than 6,000 articles, poems, essays, and videos courtesy of more than 1,000 writers, poets, artists, and passionate thinkers. All deeply personal, significant, and with viewpoints you won’t get elsewhere.
Looking ahead: Even more. In our new, daily incarnation, you will be able to have more connection with our authors. We’ll be more mobile-enabled; the look and feel will be more fun and intuitive.
Early next week Cultural Daily will come into being. It will be a new birth with a solid history. We welcome you as we embark together.
Photo by Henning Witzel on Unsplash
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