Is Stonehenge One (Really Big) Carillon?
“A number of rocks, when struck, made ‘distinctive (if muted) sounds.’ They judged that enough made sounds such that once, they all would have rung, and furthermore saw marks on the rocks that might—upon further forensic testing—prove to be strike marks.”
Why We Should Listen More To This Bach (His Name Is Carl)
“Bach’s restless, radical new style fits within history — with the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War, the shifting of nations and the Enlightenment, which encouraged individualism.”
What Happened To The Memorials For The Fall Of The Berlin Wall?
“The 25th anniversary the fall of the Berlin Wall is approaching this autumn, and the anniversary is set to be marked by the unveiling of two major memorials in central Leipzig and Berlin. But their ceremonial inauguration is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future — there are just too many problems with the schedules and the budgets of both.”
Wrangling Insects In The Service Of Art
“Any fool could put a bucket of cockroaches on a table. But it takes somebody knowledgeable to know how to make them act for a camera.”
Will This Guy (Or Anyone) Save The Music Business?
“He is putting songs on smartphones in Africa, reviving moribund American record labels and making Lorde into a Grammy-winning global sensation. Above all, he wants to forge new partnerships with his industry’s erstwhile adversaries — the technology firms that have upended the way people get their music.”
Will Copyright Ruling For Anti-Islamic Film Chill Moviemaking?
“The video had flimsy production values and was just 14 minutes long, but internet service providers fear they will pay a lasting price for Innocence of Muslims. A court order to remove the anti-Islamic film from YouTube has paved the way for attempts to menace other creative visual works under cover of copyright, some legal experts have warned.”
Writers Aren’t Required To Envision A Perfect World
“I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way. And the pressure, I feel, is growing, not just from provincial academics such as Friess but from my own peers, whom I witness daily lacerating themselves – perhaps under the influence of the academics who are the only people now able to give them employment – for their moral failings.”
Why Does Anyone Get A Ph.D. And What Do You Do With It After You Get It?
“I didn’t need a Ph.D. to work at Kickstarter, just like I wouldn’t have needed a Ph.D. to wait tables (though it adds color to both). In truth, nobody needs a Ph.D. Ok technically you need one to be a college professor, but it is not an indicator of whether you will be a good college professor.”
How An Orchestra Looks Affects How You Think It Sounds
“Participants across the board were better at identifying the more accomplished groups by watching them, not by listening to them. In fact, even when music and video were combined in clips, it was actually harder for participants to identify the top groups than by video alone.”
Yes, White People Should Belly Dance (If They Do It Respectfully)
“Appropriation can be insensitive or disrespectful in all sorts of particular instances. But often, it is wonderful.”
Are TV Cases Clogging The UK’s Criminal Courts – And Should The Punishment Become Less Dire?
In 2012, “180,000 people were prosecuted for not paying their licence – which is needed to watch or record live broadcasts on any device – accounting for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions that year.”
Sheila MacRae, AKA Alice Kramden In ‘The Honeymooners’ Sketches, Dead At Age 92
“When friends and relatives wished her a happy 90th birthday in 2011, her family said in a statement, she replied, ‘I am only 90 in London.’”
How Science Fiction Books And Movies Changed Development In California
“This was so accepted as a likely trajectory for the city that it was written into an LA redevelopment plan as a warning of what could happen were the plan not adopted. The plan, LA 2000: A City for the Future, calls this ‘the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities.’”
Gerard Mortier, Feisty Opera Visionary, Dies At 70
“These clashes were always expressions of Mr. Mortier’s bracing and intellectually charged vision of opera, and his disdain for the decorous irrelevance often associated with it.”
Women, Art, And Engineering At The Google Cultural Institute
“I realised that a lot of women’s work was not well documented. I wanted to keep working on a project that would group together information and archives about women artists, and I thought the best vehicle for that would be the web.”
Martha Graham Company Strugles To Come Back After Internal Struggles And A Flood
“The estimated damage came to more than $4 million, a daunting sum for a company with an annual budget of just under $5 million that, in 2000, was forced to suspend operations for two years because of crippling debts.”
How To Get Rid Of Those Songs That Get Stuck In Your Head
“While people’s strategies for ridding themselves of unwanted aural guests fell into one of two broad categories—distraction or coping—the most successful way to remove an earworm, they found, was to deal with it head on, by intentionally listening to the song or singing it out loud, no matter how embarrassing the song.”
Gender Gap: Study Reports Lack Of Top Women Directors At North American Museums
“Women run just a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States and Canada, and they earn about a third less than their male counterparts, according to a report released on Friday by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization.”
How Do You Figure Out The Future Of Theatre If You’re Stuck In The Past?
“I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should cease to celebrate, cherish and, indeed, support our rich theatre culture – and that includes what has gone before. But by playing it too safe, hunkering down and not shifting investment into grassroots, new forms and genuine risk-taking productions, there is a real possibility that you will destroy theatre’s many possible and as yet undreamed of futures.”
Stepping Out – Retirement Is Tough For Dancers
“The great majority of current dancers claim to be aware of the challenges that transition will pose (98 percent, 86 percent and 93 percent in the U.S., Switzerland and Australia, respectively), but many former dancers concede that they were in fact ill-prepared for this process.”
Does Getty’s New Free Image Policy Mean Others Will Follow?
“The change has been greeted like some kind of major capitulation. But that’s actually not quite true: This is merely the latest move in a slow shift toward a new and more realist take on digital monetization — a shift that’s been going on for years.”
Chairman Of The Sydney Biennale Steps Down Under Protest
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis “left as more artists said they would pull out of the event in protest over its main sponsor, his family’s construction company Transfield Holdings. The firm provides services for the Australian government’s controversial immigration detention centres.”
Study: Big Gender Gap In Pay For Museum Directors
“It found that female directors at museums with budgets of more than $15 million earn 71 cents for every $1 male directors earn. At the same time, women who run art museums with smaller budgets do earn more than their male counterparts – annually, they earn 2 cents more.”
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The Densest Music Ever?
“Black MIDI,” a subculture of electronic music remixing that mutated into existence in Japan five years ago, is an aesthetic snapshot of the early 21st century if there ever was one. It’s digital, viral, and truly “multimedia”–because it’s music, data visualization, and software demonstration at once.
Arundhati Roy: Activist Fiction
“I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction, and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ “
Rising New York Rents Pushing Artists Out Of The City
Being studioless, some have put their art careers aside. Others have begun to ask: If they can’t afford gritty, unglamorous Industry City, then where?
“Inherent Dullness”: A Young Man Goes To An Orchestra Concert
“I had trouble enjoying myself. My brother did too. This by no means is to suggest that the orchestra itself was poor. Perhaps me and my bro are just uncultured, southern swine. More likely it was just not for us (and by extension a lot of people in my age range). I enjoy symphony music. I have a playlist of classical music on my Spotify. But I thought sitting and watching the orchestra play has an inherent dullness.”
Why Ravel Was An (Almost) Great Composer
“Everything in Ravel’s music is held at a distance, as it was in his life. Just think what iron discipline and self-denial it must have taken, to keep the messy intimacies of life at bay. There’s a similar denial in the music. You always know where the music’s heading; there’s no sense of discovery or risk.”
Oh… So You Thought You Were Supposed To Read Those Books On Your Shelf
“A survey has found that half of an average home’s 138 books go unread. I’m surprised it is as low as a half. Books aren’t meant to be read.”
How Science Is Trying To Look Inside Your Soul
If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you.
The New World Trade Center – A Panoramic View From The Top Of The World
“No doubt the new building’s official dedication will open the way to a necessary debate over its merits as architecture and urbanism, its turbulent design history and the compromises made over the long years it took to get the thing built. But in one important respect, One World Trade Center has already succeeded. It has reclaimed the sky. And this is the view from there.”
The Art World’s Most Narcissistic Exercise Is About To Commence (Can’t Wait)
“The Biennial is the most purely narcissistic of all New York art world events, an orgy of navel-gazing that can leave a bad feeling—a sense of unease, if not disgust.”
Japan’s “Beethoven” Apologizes
“Ditching his trademark long hair and sunglasses, a clean-cut Mamoru Samuragochi repeatedly bowed in shame before a packed press conference in a Tokyo hotel, where some dubious reporters dragged along hearing-impairment experts to assess the mock maestro.”
Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook
“If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember – I often tell myself – is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the net that matters.”
Why Do We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others?
Bernd Brunner (aggrieved): “People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive. They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure … According to popular accounts, it was five hundred years ago when the apparently polyglot Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, declared ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.’”