Critical Drift

h/t Silja Sormunen, Thilo Gross, and Jari Saramäki: Once the brain reaches a critical state, balanced between order and chaos, it doesn’t stay in place. It continues to shift and explore different configurations within that critical state. Such a critical drift allows the system to adapt and potentially discover new patterns or behaviors.

I’m Olivia Giovetti and I’m a journalist and cultural critic, as well as the former classical & opera editor at Time Out New York and a former editor at VAN Magazine. I’ve also covered culture and society (the theoretical kind not the gala kind) for the London Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, Washington Post, NPR, and more. (You can find recent non-substack writing here.)

Wait didn’t you used to be called something else?

This Substack began in 2020 as Undone, a blog in the tradition of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This and Catherine Clément’s Opera: The Undoing of Women, devoted to the untold and under-told stories of classical music history. (The name was an homage to both Clément and Isobel Campbell.)

What’s changed since then is a shift in perspective from the histories of classical music to a broader look at the place of art in our current society and world.

Perhaps the best description of what gets published here comes from Benjamin Moser: Everything I feel like writing about but don't have the energy to pitch. To which I’ll add: everything I wrote around to get to the pieces that I do manage to pich.