Yearly Archives: 2021
AI Pioneer: People Are Mistaking What Ai Is
“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that...
Music Of The Millennia: Sound And Music In Evolution
Pitch is an abstraction: any given note doesn’t have a real-world referent. The existence of flutes that produce a family of fixed notes, however,...
Authenticity As An Ideal? Really?
Is authenticity fading away as a personal ethic or is it something everyone wants to be? In fact, both are true – because the...
Canadian Theatres Use Lockdown To Upgrade
Venue operators are using their enforced downtime to scrub, buff and do major reconfigurations. In some cases, the work was commissioned and started before...
You’re Teaching Dance To Incarcerated Men. COVID Locks Everything Down. How Do You Keep...
Good old-fashioned letters, it turns out. Choreographer and educator Suchi Branfman has been running her Dancing Through Prison Walls project with inmates of the...
Reckoning: The Treatment Of Women In Ballet
Ballet is often seen as the glorification of women -but, wherever it stands now, it condoned and encouraged the sexual trafficking of women for...
Museums’ Secret Weapon For COVID Safety: Really Good HVAC
The standards for heating, ventilation and air conditioning at North American and European museums tend to be quite high: minimizing airborne dust and maintaining...
A Find In The Middle Of The Kalahari Desert Shows A Remarkably Innovative Culture...
The conclusion from these finds is that people in the African interior weren’t lagging behind coastal cultures at all. Some of the most important...
She Was The First Englishwoman Ever To Earn A Living Writing. She Was Also...
She traveled to the Low Countries and Suriname on missions for King Charles II, and she took up writing to support herself because he...
140 Filmmakers Blast PBS For Over-dependence On Ken Burns And Lack Of Diversity
"The decades-long interdependence of PBS decision-makers, philanthropists, and corporate funders with one white, male filmmaker highlights the racial and cultural inequities perpetuated by this...
What A Raga Is, And What It Is Not
"I should say that a raga is not a tune. It's not a note, not a scale, not a composition — although the raga...
A Wilting Critique Of Meritocracy
The story of the concept of ‘meritocracy’ has been well rehearsed in recent times, largely because of the way in which inequality and precarity...
‘Follies’ At 50: Why Sondheim’s Musical May Be The Most Important Flop Ever To...
"It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, one gun. What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely:...
Ian McKellen On Playing Hamlet At Age 81
"I can't pretend I'm 20. No one's going to believe it. But I can feel that I'm 20. … One advantage is, when I...
Maybe Public Radio Stations Should Cut Two-Thirds Of Their Weekend Programming
Eric Nuzum: "The average number of unduplicated shows aired over Saturdays and Sundays is 25. Do all those programs help build audience? Station listeners...
Where The Candidates For Mayor Of New York City Stand On Arts And Culture
"New York City is heading into one of its most consequential elections in decades. … For the purposes of this inquiry, we asked eight...
How A Gang Of Wall-Climbing, Web-Slinging Rare Book Thieves Was Brought To Justice
In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers,...
It Was Inevitable: New NFT Of ‘Salvator Mundi’ Holding Fistful Of Benjamins
"It sounds like an April Fools joke, and it both is and isn't. Author and art historian Ben Lewis has created a real non-fungible...
Venice Finally Bans Big Cruise Ships From Lagoon And Historic District
"For years, campaigns to oust cruise ships from the lagoon have been gaining traction, with locals claiming that the ships' massive structures erode the...
UK Theatre Returns To Stages, Having Learned Some Things During Lockdown
Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as...
Experimental Film Captures Dance In The Wild
“We were demonstrating that we were still there, that we were still dancing, that we still wanted to dance, that we were still those...
What Music Festivals Could Look Like This Summer
Certainly with international travel likely to be restricted in some form for a while, the chances are that international and local demand for festivals...
What Good Is Criticism After Something Bad Happens?
Every day I’m thankful for the work I get to do. I am paid to watch, to think, to write. But this week, like...
Big Claims For The Kind Of Art AI Will Make
Miller argues that AI-fueled art gains independence from its algorithmic parents and takes flight in works that bear the hallmarks of creativity and genius...
In Search Of Classical Music From Africa
Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber writes about his colleague Rebeca Omordia, a pianist of Romanian and Nigerian parentage who, since 2013, has been pursuing a...
