It’s safe to say that effective altruism is no longer the small, eclectic club of philosophers, charity researchers, and do-gooders it was just a decade ago. It’s an idea, and group of people, with roughly $26.6 billion in resources behind them, real and growing political power, and an increasing ability to noticeably change the world. - Vox
"This playwright read a Wikipedia page that mentioned a fascinating historical incident wherein Benedict Arnold and Frank Sinatra spent a night at the same tavern. What conversations they must have had! By the time the article was corrected, the writer was already halfway through." - The New Yorker
The deal offers a rare flicker of hope for the digital publishing sector, which has been fraught with difficulty for investors and operators over the last decade. Some of Axios’s peers have struggled to go public, sell or raise funding at favorable valuations as investors have cooled on digital advertising. - The New York Times
The Canadian code probably won’t have a material financial impact on these platforms, but countries learning from each other, improving on the model, and it spreading globally very could. - NiemanLab
Painters, sculptors and other visual artists stand to get a payout when their work is resold at auction and by galleries, in a government move designed to help sustain thousands of artists currently working below the poverty line. - Yahoo
Margaret Sullivan: "Local residents should show up at school board meetings to express dissent publicly, get in touch directly with school administrators to insist that established procedures be followed before summarily removing books from shelves, and let state and local legislators know of their opposition." - MSN (The Washington Post)
"I identify much more as a composer. A couple of times, I backed away from conducting for a while. I felt it’s not a professional advantage to be a double threat. It takes a lot of time to be as well prepared as a conductor." - San Francisco Classical Voice
"Analysts ... first mined Google Street View footage in cities around the world for images of hundreds of residential streets and some 2400 iconic buildings. Then, they calculated the proportions of all those edifices to find out how closely each adhered to the Golden Ratio." - Mental Floss
Values are promoted through cultural strategies where buzzwords chime loudly. Terms like networking, collaboration, common good, connection and cooperation promote an ever-closer union with culture, while the arts are deployed for soft power and propagandist tactics. - The Critic
"Are there more types of fake blood than there are of real blood? Oh, positively. ... As a prop master for the last 30-odd years, I've had to navigate my way through some truly inspirational and some pretty disastrous blood special effects ideas posed by directors and actors." - American Theatre
Rubbing shoulders with strangers is considered both a pleasure and a pain of urban life. Density can be an endless source of social possibility, of chance encounters in city streets. - Aeon
"It turns out the crossword industry really does consist of earnest wordplay lovers donating their time to unpaid mentorships, generally as part of an industry-wide effort to bring new and underrepresented people into crosswords. Unfortunately, the end result might be even more exclusive than a pay-to-play scheme." - The New Republic
Here’s the thing about the wisdom of crowds – it only applies when those individual decisions are reached independently. Once we start influencing each other’s decision, that wisdom disappears. - MediaPost
"A Yayoi Kusama pumpkin, Rashid Johnson mosaic, and a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture — in the likeness of an endangered marine mammal — are among the 40 new and commissioned public artworks to be installed throughout (the capital)." - ARTnews
New programming initiatives mean musicians are rehearsing more unfamiliar works, and, come curtain time, standard repertoire sometimes ends up underrehearsed. Shutdown-induced layoffs mean remaining administrative staffers do the work of two or more people. They're burning out, and management's biggest concerns seem to be elsewhere. - San Francisco Classical Voice
