The Culture Wars Buffet France, And The Schools Are The Battleground
“Changes to how Joan of Arc and other touchstone historical figures are taught in elementary school, as well as changes to how French, Latin and Greek are introduced, have sparked fierce arguments between right-leaning politicians and intellectuals, who believe schools should foster national pride, and the Socialist education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and her defenders, who argue that the curriculum should reflect changes in society.”
Iraq’s Newest Museum Opens – In Saddam’s Former Palace In The City He Tried To Strangle
“The Basrah Museum has been planned for eight years and will join the National Museum in Baghdad as one of the most important institutions in Iraq. For the first time in a generation, the people of southern Iraq will have their own museum – a great achievement under extremely difficult circumstances.”
Brent Assink To Leave San Francisco Symphony
Assink has been executive director for 17 years. “Running an organization presenting more than 220 concerts a year, with an operating budget close to $70 million (and including the crisis years of the Great Recession), Assink guided the orchestra through many challenges, saved it from going deeper into debt, even during the unusually expensive season celebrating the Symphony’s centennial in 2011, and allowed it to maintain high standards.”
Want Creative Kids? Give Them Things That Will Bore Them
“Boredom is where creativity is born. Boredom is not the enemy. Boredom is the friend. Boredom is what gives rise to ‘What happens when I take a picture between my fingers? What happens when I turn the camera sideways?’”
Why Is Tenure Important? It Changes What Professors Tell Us Is True
“When researchers get the message that they better not produce data that might offend the powerful, they end up telling us not what is true, but what we want to hear. Policy separates from reality, and we end up with waste and poor outcomes in education, healthcare, economics, and the justice system. Good policy cannot be built on comfortable fantasies.”
Teach The Three “R”s? That’s Not What Education Is For
“Instruction is the least important part of education. Most information is accessible from books and the media. Basic literacy and numeracy are important, but many if not most skills used by adults in daily life are picked up on the job. The main objective of education in every enduring society is to transmit authoritative cultural, political, and ethical traditions from one generation to the next.”
$200K Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award Goes To Sarah Ruhl
“Ruhl, 42, is based in Brooklyn and is the author of plays such as The Clean House, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, Passion Play and The Oldest Boy. She previously won the MacArthur ‘genius’ grant and is a Tony nominee and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.”
Is This The Most Beautiful Bookstore In The World?
“The bookstore covers a sprawling 21,000 square feet, draws in more than a million tourists, and sells about 700,000 books every year. And while most of the titles are printed in Spanish, just marveling at the theater-turned-bookshop is worth a trip.”
How Gustavo Dudamel Made His Unscheduled Impromptu Debut Conducting At The White House
The LA Philharmonic conductor was at lunch at the White House last week and the Marine band played. He was impressed. One thing led to another and…
Skyscrapers In LA’s Hot New Arts District? We’re Dubious
“Even the anti-development activists who see every tall building in Los Angeles as a giveaway to moneyed interests or a threat to the existing character of the city may find something to admire here. We’d be wise to hold on to some skepticism, though.”
How To Pay For Finishing Orlando’s New Arts Center? Mayor Calls For Resort Tax
“Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs … revealed a new plan, in a memo to county leaders, that lays out a path to get the arts center the final $45 million in tourist development tax dollars it needs to start the $185 million second phase that includes the 1,700-seat Steinmetz Hall acoustical theater.”
A 12-Step Program To Erasing Black Artists
This is what can happen if you’re really bad at organizing an event and then not paying attention when things hurtle out of control…
Google Should Buy Twitter And Attach It To YouTube: Columnist
“If you combined the fastest and slowest types of social media, the result could be both must-see and never-forgotten.”
Researchers Restore The First-Ever Computer-Generated Music
“A computer scientist and a composer have restored an ancient recording of the first ever computer-generated music. Jack Copeland and Jason Long remastered a recording of three melodies, including “God Save the Queen,” made by the BBC in the labs of computer pioneer Alan Turing in 1951.”
The African American Museum Is Finally Open. Now What?
“The new museum opens with all the usual tensions already in place. Among its major donors are banks that played a brutal role in predatory loan scandals that targeted African American communities as well as companies that manufacture the cigarettes, food and soft drinks that play such a big part in the plague of diabetes and other health issues that afflict the black population. This doesn’t mean that the museum can’t be independent, or that the scholars and curators who created the exhibitions were in any way compromised by pressure. But it does mean that it could take substantial fortitude to, say, mount an exhibition about racism and professional sports when one of museum’s major funders is the NFL. In the age of the modern, mass-market museum, freedom and independence are never a given; they must be reasserted and defended with every new exhibition.”
A Great Broadway Tradition, Lost: Sneaking In For Act Two
“There was a time when ‘second-acting’ – sneaking into a Broadway theater at intermission before the second act – was as common as the cigarette break in the middle of a musical. It was a time-honored rite of passage, practiced by generations of starving actors and students of the theater. … But today, when security is ultravigilant and shows are under pressure to sell out night after night, the practice has all but gone dark.”
Thug Sentenced To Nine Years For Destroying Timbuktu Mausoleums
“Ahmad Al Mahdi could have faced up to 30 years in prison, but mitigating circumstances—including his guilty plea, his initial reluctance to destroy the sites and his co-operation with the prosecution—meant this term was reduced.”
Is The Mysterious Medieval Code Of The Voynich Manuscript Actually Meaningless Gibberish?
“The manuscript has baffled cryptographers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains hundreds of pages of fine calfskin parchment, which scientists have dated to the first half of the 15th century. … Academics continue to hotly debate whether the manuscript is an elaborate hoax designed to fool 15th-century book collectors, or a detailed secret code that remains unbroken.”
Here Are Five Finalists For Design Of New Port Authority Bus Terminal In New York
“The designs that may one day replace the existing hellish landscape [sic] of the Port Authority Bus Terminal are finally here. Earlier today, the Port Authority revealed the five finalists and their mammoth proposals for a new bus terminal as part of the agency’s international design and deliverability contest.” (Aw c’mon, it’s not that bad.)
The Personalities Of Rocks, A Chemistry Award For Volkswagen, And $10 Trillion Prizes: The 2016 Ig Nobels
“Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the year.”
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Maastricht Art Fair Makes A Move Into Manhattan
“The American debut of the European Fine Art Fair … is more than just another event on the cultural calendar. It’s an attempt by the fair, whose 270 exhibitors face a shrinking audience in Europe, to secure and revitalize its future.”
William Eddins To Step Down From Edmonton Symphony At End Of This Season
“Eddins, who lives in Minneapolis, Minn. and spends about 14 weeks of the year in Edmonton, joined the ESO in 2005. Under his tenure, the orchestra worked with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and soprano Renée Fleming, started a late-night series of performances, and played unconventional works by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů and weirdo genius Frank Zappa, among others.”
Simon Keenlyside Back In Action After Almost Two Years Of Throat Trouble
First he felt a “tick” in his vocal cords during a live simulcast of Rigoletto from Vienna (he had to bow out mid-opera), then his doctors told him he needed thyroid surgery. “Luckily it was a false alarm, but they had to take some out, and they did a bad job. That stopped me dead in my tracks. I couldn’t sing a note for five, six, seven months. Nothing.”
Pierre Huyghe Wins Second-Ever $100K Nasher Sculpture Prize
“Huyghe, 54, succeeds last year’s inaugural winner, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, who received, as Huyghe will, the $100,000 grand prize, along with a special award created by Italian architect Renzo Piano, who designed the Nasher.”
Fire Closes Paris’s Mogador Theatre
The blaze began on Sunday morning (Sept. 25) under the theatre’s stage; it damaged the stage floor and scenery for the upcoming, and now postponed, production of Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.
Construction Of The Philharmonie De Paris Cost Triple The Original Budget
When the concert hall was approved in 2006, the projected cost was €173.1 million; the final cost as of 2015 was €534.7 million, an overrun of 208%, according to a report from the regional auditors’ office for Ile-de-France. (in French; Google Translate version here)
Star Of UK’s Favorite Soap Fired For Anti-Indian Twitter Rant (He’s From Pakistan)
“[Marc Anwar joined the cast of Coronation Street] as Sharif Nazir in February 2014 as a member of the first Muslim family on the cobbles. The Sunday Mirror published screenshots of messages posted on his private Twitter account that appeared to hit out at India over Kashmir … They also referred to Indian people as [redacted].”
Fire Ravages Stockholm’s Royal Institute Of Art
“The institution, which focuses on the fine arts and architecture at the undergrad, grad, and post-grad level, is located near downtown Stockholm on Skeppsholmen island” next door to the city’s modern art museum. “The fire reportedly started on the fourth floor, and it quickly spread to the building’s attic and roof.”
Why Writing About Science Seems Like Little More Than PR
“Think about it. For every article singing the praises of new science, how often do you see one that is critical? Not often. Unless you’re talking about eugenics or fission bombs, a new scientific result or technology is almost always treated as an unequivocally good thing.”
What Machine Learning Is Teaching Us About How We Learn
“By bringing the tools of computation and machine intuition to the table, AI researchers are giving us a more complete picture of how we learn. They are also broadening the study of education to include quantitative, numerical models of the learning process itself. “The thing that AI brings to the table is that it forces us to get into the details of how everything works,” says John Laird, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. If there was any doubt that good teachers are important, machine learning is helping put it to rest.”