Today’s Stories
Van Gogh’s Weirdest Self-Portrait, Long Considered By Some A Forgery, Is Genuine
Doubts about the authenticity of the painting, which depicts the artist giving some serious side-eye, first arose in 1970. But research conducted jointly by the National Gallery of Norway (which owns the work) and the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has determined that the portrait is no forgery — and that it’s the only one van Gogh ever painted while hospitalized for psychosis. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Brazil’s Culture Secretary Fired After Quoting Goebbels In Video Speech
“A few minutes into the speech, secretary of culture Roberto Alvim said, ‘The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and it will be national, it’ll be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement and deeply committed to the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing.’ The line is a slightly modified version of a Goebbels quote … [and] the video also featured music from Lohengrin, Adolf Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera.” The subsequent outcry was huge, and Alvin was ousted within 24 hours. – artnet
Computer Can Tell It’s You By The Way You Dance
Studying how people move to music is a powerful tool for researchers looking to understand how and why music affects us the way it does. Over the last few years, researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have used motion capture technology—the same kind used in Hollywood—to learn that your dance moves say a lot about you, such as how extroverted or neurotic you are, what mood you happen to be in, and even how much you empathize with other people. – Phys.org
Study: Pop Culture And Nature Seem To Evolve At The Same Rate
Using metrics designed by evolutionary biologists, they compared the rates of cultural change to the rates of biological change for finches from the Galapagos Islands, two kinds of moths, and a common British snail. The result was kind of surprising: Biology and culture move at about the same speed. – Wired
Tony Hall To Step Down From Running The BBC At Critical Moment
The announcement comes as the publicly funded BBC is facing intense political and public pressure amid a fast-changing media landscape and viewing habits. It has been criticized by both sides of the Brexit debate over its coverage of the U.K.’s impending departure from the European Union, and some in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government have suggested changing the BBC’s funding model. – Washington Post (AP)
Alan Turing And The Shaping Of Artificial Intelligence
Had Turing lived longer, perhaps the state of artificial intelligence would encompass more than drearily corporate banalities such as the Amazon checkout window making suggestions about what you might like for your next purchase, Google offering up a few words for how to complete a sentence in progress, or a South Korean genius having his soul crushed by a roomful of statistics wonks—not to mention more chillingly Orwellian developments, such as facial-recognition software. – The New Yorker
Small Talk And The Jockeying For Status
Status-mongering is the mess that results from leaving some of our ethical theorizing undone. We don’t know who we think we are, and it shows. – The Point
Podcasts are Wildly Popular Right Now. Do We Care If They’re Accurate?
Podcasts rich in detail and narrative are finding big audiences. But many of the stories they tell are misleading or inaccurate. How do we know? How do we vet? – Harper’s
The Quality Versus Opportunity Debate – A Predictable Oscars Ritual
The Academy’s perceived snubs—of actors such as Us’s Lupita Nyong’o and Hustlers’ Jennifer Lopez, along with directors such as Little Women’s Greta Gerwig and The Farewell’s Lulu Wang—are as unfortunate as they are predictable. And comments like Stephen King’s reveal a major reason why: Diversity is too often discussed as something separate from, or even in conflict with, artistic virtue. – The Atlantic
Is Amazon About To Take Over The Bestseller Book Business?
The conventional wisdom that now governs book publishing—that things are, for the first time in a long time, not that bad—is wrong. At the very least, it overlooks the fact that Amazon has spent the last decade accumulating yet more power and leverage, and that its ambitions have since moved past simply being the world’s largest bookstore. On Tuesday evening, The Wall Street Journal surveyed one of the most important recent developments in the industry: Amazon is finally publishing work by some of America’s biggest authors. – The New Republic
Canada’s “Prairie Castles” Are Disappearing
Grain elevators were once an icon of Canada’s west: often painted a bright boxcar red, they stood in towns across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. As the tallest structures in the vast landscapes, they were visible from kilometers away and were known as “prairie castles” or “prairie cathedrals”. – The Guardian
How Ubiquitous Public Surveillance Is Changing Our Understanding Of Human Behavior
“My colleagues want to better understand how people behave in the wild and how we can capture every-day behavior without asking people to self report … [because] that’s a very unreliable way of collecting data. What I’m seeing is just a very new landscape and regulations that are not ready.” – Vice
Reconsidering Alan Bloom’s “Closed Minds”
Re-reading Bloom, I am thunderstruck, because my inclination is to blame it all on social media and attendant technologies favoring vicarious experience. But Bloom’s 1987 narrative establishes an earlier start. He distinguishes my sixties’ generation from his eighties’ students, in whom tendencies that we initiated yielded a dead end. It may in effect be read as a tale of unwanted, unanticipated consequences. – The American Interest
National Archives Blurs Anti-Trump Protest Signs Of 2017 Women’s March In Exhibition
By blurring out details from protest signs in an image of the 2017 Women’s March, including the name of President Trump and references to the female anatomy — a decision the Archives publicly apologized for on Saturday — it has damaged the faith many Americans, particularly women, may have had in its role as an impartial conservator of the nation’s records. – Washington Post
A Group Of Musicians Relocate To A Failing Town To Create A New Culture. Townspeople Resist
The group wanted to Klein Jasedow provides a nearly perfect test case for a theory, popular within the classical music industry, which postulates that if we could just tweak the atmosphere in which the work is presented, we could unleash its universal potential. – Van
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Artistic Director: Australian National Academy of Music
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Boston Landmarks Orchestra Seeks Executive Director
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New Jersey Symphony Orchestra seeks Chief Financial Officer
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Jazz Saxophonist Jimmy Heath, 93
Mr. Heath’s saxophone sound was spare but playful, with a beaming tone that exuded both joy and command. But his reputation rested equally on his abilities as a composer and arranger for large ensembles, interpolating bebop’s crosshatched rhythms and extended improvisations into fulsome tapestries. – The New York Times
How Did The Grammys Go From ‘Step Up’ To This CEO Implosion?
After a male CEO told women in music to “step up” if they wanted to win Grammys, the Recording Academy formed a blue-ribbon task force to reform the organization, hired a woman CEO last August … and then asked her to step down 10 days before this year’s ceremony. There were rumors of bullying, but there’s so much more going on. “Dugan is said to have filed a memo weeks ago with the academy’s human resources department outlining concerns she’d developed over voting irregularities, financial mismanagement, ‘exorbitant and unnecessary’ legal fees and ‘conflicts of interest involving members of the academy’s board, executive committee and outside lawyers.'” Ah. Surely this will end well for the Recording Academy. – Los Angeles Times
At Sundance This Year, One-Fourth Of The Documentaries Come From A New Company
Concordia Studio was founded two years ago by the multibillionaire widow of Steve Jobs and an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, and this is the year that money and expertise come onto the national (and international) documentary scene. Laurene Powell Jobs: “We are at a moment when cynicism and division are abundant, but we have seen that stories can bring people together. … Concordia is a belief that film has the power to shine a spotlight on the important narratives of life that too often are overlooked.” – The New York Times
Wait, ‘1917,’ It Might Be The Year Of ‘Parasite’
If the SAG Awards are any guide – and they can be – Parasite may win best picture; it won best ensemble at the ceremony on Sunday night. “When the Parasite cast, none of whom received individual nominations, earned a warm standing ovation early in the night from the audience of actors at the Shrine Auditorium, while introducing the film, it was clear where the crowd’s affections resided.” – Los Angeles Times
When The Washington Post Talked About The Top Book Trends Of The Last Decade, They Went Kinda Easy On A Big (Sometimes Bad) Player
Normally terrific, WaPo book critic Ron Charles goes lightly on Amazon, whose CEO owns the paper. So it’s time to consider some issues he missed. “E-books and audiobooks have greatly improved the reading experience over the past decade for those who can afford to pay Amazon for Kindle and Audible digital books. We have yet to figure out what the cost of Amazon’s dominance of e-books and audiobooks will be to the broader digital book ecosystem.” – Inside Higher Ed
Not Telling The Same Old Story Again And Again And Again And Again And Again
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon created the movie The Big Sick, lightly based on their own lives and romance, and had such success that now they’ve won an Apple TV+ series, Little America, that tells the lightly fictionalized stories of immigrants in unusual situations (or perhaps they’re quite usual – without these stories, how would the public know?). Nanjiani says, “American pop culture is the most widespread in the world, and [pop culture was] selling that second side of America, and we wanted to buy it. You can do what you want to do, be what you want to be. Not everyone in the series believes that, but that’s a key idea.” – The Guardian (UK)
The European Union Is Considering Banning Facial Recognition Technology For Five Years
Facial recognition tech is advanced and is everywhere from our phones to sports arenas to public spaces to, in China, everywhere. But it’s far from perfect. “One such risk of the technology is that current facial recognition methods are far from perfect, and many times the systems powering facial recognition are racially biased. Given that, the European Commission’s recommendation seems like the logical, reasonable thing to do.” – Fast Company
Singer-Songwriter David Olney Says ‘I’m Sorry,’ Closes His Eyes, Drops His Head, And Dies Onstage
Olney, 71 and regarded as “the founding father of Americana,” was performing at a songwriters’ festival in Florida when he suffered a fatal heart attack. “‘He was very still, sitting upright with his guitar on, wearing the coolest hat and a beautiful rust suede jacket we laughed about because it was raining … outside the boathouse where we were playing,’ singer Amy Rigby, who said she was sitting next to him onstage, wrote on Facebook.” – The Washington Post
This Author Says This Moment Isn’t As New As We Like To Think
And actually, Jacqueline Woodson says, that’s a good thing to know on a deep level, so that she doesn’t only despair at lead poisoning in Flint or the rise of asthma after 9/11. “It’s so important to know that whatever moment we’re in, we’re not in it for the first time. … Knowing that something like this has happened before, and that we survived it, is really important for me as a writer.” – The Guardian (UK)
An Israeli Museum Cancelled An Artist’s Talk Because He Identifies As Palestinian
The Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa said that Saher Miahi’s identity did not fit with guidelines from its funders, the Hecht Foundation. The university rescheduled the talk for elsewhere. The artist said, “I was a student at this university and I’m still collaborating with it. Now, this museum is telling me that I don’t belong here.” The move was widely criticized by others on and off campus. – Hyperallergic