Acquired tastes and the pleasures of imitation
I've been thinking about Pierre Bourdieu and also about what I think are common and reductive misreadings of Bourdieu. Bourdieu says two things which will often strike people as incompatible enough that they pay attention only to the first, to wit: That acquired tastes provide those who acquire them symbolic capital.
Receptivity & Resistance
Almost all efforts to foster receptivity in general run into the problem of exclusionary thinking, of dichotomizing, of policing the boundary between what we should be receptive to and what we shouldn't.  For example, I want to say, "be open to everything," but then why does my blood boil when the Humanities lecture is announced and it's Mary Oliver?