I know this is no consolation, but there are worse things in the jazz world. For instance, I am a nearly-50-year-old jazz guitarist! In Brazil! Think of what that means to a man.

But one thing I've learnt along the years is that, though there is such a thing as "high art", we can't be too reverent. The short and the long of it is that every man, even the most artsy cream-of-the-crop musician, is in it for his livelihood. Every "wow" is another cent in their pocket; and that's what they strive at, even if in their younger days they sounded (or still sound) like reckless visionaries.

My own feeling is that you are too reverent towards jazz as an art form. You must learn this: jazz is only an art form as long as people make money out of it. If there had been no money to be made in jazz, it would've disappeared long ago, and you wouldn't even have heard of it.

And how do jazz musicians make money? Well, not by being by being reverent, but by being reckless. Seasoned theatre actors hate to share the stage with animals: once an animal hits the stage, it will atract every single eye in the audience, not because it is cute, but because its behaviour is unpredictable. If they were rational, animals would be rich. And so can you, if you learn to channel your animal instincts to drive your music and your stage act.

And smile while you're at it.

The current vogue for JAusten seems to me to be an entirely made-up phenomenon. I don't see any unmarried women with a clear, outstanding preference for Austen's novels or Austen-based adaptations. They read Austen's books along with those by countless other writers and their Austen-inspired t-shirts hang along with dozens of other t-shirts featuring all sorts of different themes. They're not going to count the minutes before their Austen t-shirt are in laundry. For all they care, they might be swooning over Mr Rochester if an actor like Colin Firth could be procured for the role.

This article and many of the books mentioned are based on a false premise. Though there are a few younger, single women who are targeted by the Austen market, it's not unmarried women who have a clear preference for Austen stories. It's married women, divorced women, women past the age at which Austen died who never found a Mr Darcy who was malleable enough to learn from them and er... be molded into something more woman-friendly: that is, women who have been through the reality-check and did not enjoy it. They wish to hark back not to a historical past, but to their own past, to a time when their future lay ahead of them and lush with the possibility of making the right choices.

This whole article seems sorely superficial in its attempt to debunk the value of images as evidence.

The analogy between Kennedy's assassination and 9/11 is a silly one if used to uphold the view that no matter how many cameras and viewpoints we have of an event, we shall never reach a consensus about its true significance. Zapruder filmed at relatively close range what happened in one car. The cameras around the WTC were in greater number but they filmed two airplanes and two buildings from a much greater distance in an event that involved an enormously larger set of variables. So, proportionately, both events did not have the same image coverage: there is a marked disadvantage to the latter.

Also, if the Hastorf-Cantril study had shown the Dartmouth and Princeton students a large number of closer, more detailed and revealing footage of that game, there would certainly have been a greater coincidence between the reports from the two camps, barring those made in bad faith. And let's not forget that there are more people in the world than Princeton and Dartmouth fans who're capable of assessing fair play.

Mr Manjoo's attempt to discredit interpretations based on images willfully ignores that the question is never whether images can prove a point but rather how many images and what level of detail would be sufficient to ascertain truth.