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What TikTok Has Taught Us About Learning

A recent Harvard study showed that students actually learn more when education is built on “active learning,” which promotes working collaboratively on projects. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the disruption of education as kids and young adults have been forced to learn from home. In the collective reckoning on what learning should look like going forward, I’ve found...

How Did A Cranky Old Scholar Come To Own An Indigenous Language?

Frank Siebert’s writing system was an obstacle for people who were eager to learn the language. “It was a giant pain for everyone,” he said. “Why did this white guy come in and introduce such a nonintuitive alphabet? It was really off-putting. Like, ‘This is the language my grandmother spoke, and now there’s all this technical stuff I have...

How NFTs Fit Into The Performance Art Tradition

"As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in radical ways by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society." - The Conversation

‘I’m Just Free, Now That I Don’t Have To Worry About Fees’: Frank Gehry At 92

"Buzzing through his sprawling work space, the architect said he has now reached a point in his career where he has the luxury of focusing on what matters to him most: projects that promote social justice." - The New York Times

How Social Media Has Collapsed Our Expression Of Thoughtful Ideas

"Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas. We are unable to change our minds or to persuade others. We are not even in a position to form our views in thoughtful, disinterested ways. But there may yet be a way out. Precisely by codifying and accelerating the...

A Year Into The Pandemic, Dancers Talk About How They’ve Adjusted Their Movement And Approach For Online Performance

"How are dancers developing performance energy? How can artistry best be communicated through the camera? What is the best angle to present technique? Dance Theatre of Harlem's Derek Brockington explains that dancing for film is 'about acknowledging that it's not going to be the same experience — it's a different way of dancing.' Below, Brockington and several other dancers...

New Director Of Pompeii Talks Culture Of Archaeology

"I would like to reiterate the concept I have of archaeology not only as a study of beautiful objects or monuments but also of very ephemeral traces. The real discovery, in fact, was not the object itself but the landscape that has been transformed over the centuries. Today that landscape is still agricultural but in it we have found...

A Lawsuit About AI And Intellectual Property Law Now Involves R2D2 And WALL-E

An American company is suing a Chinese company in U.S. federal court for copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property violations. The goods in question? Interactive toy robots. And both the defendant's motion to dismiss the case and the plaintiff's response have invoked the famous movie robots. - The Hollywood Reporter

Two Beloved California Movie Theatre Chains To Close

ArcLight's stable includes the prized Cinerama Dome Hollywood. The Dome, built in 1963 by Pacific Theatres' parent company the Decurion Corp., is the crown jewel of the small theater complex that was later reconstructed in the early 2000s. Throughout the decades, the Dome, in particular, has been a favorite site place to stage premieres — it timed its opening...

Singing By Hand: How To Translate Songs Into American Sign Language

"A good A.S.L. performance prioritizes dynamics, phrasing and flow. The parameters of sign language — hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation and facial expression — can be combined with elements of visual vernacular, a body of codified gestures, allowing a skilled A.S.L. speaker to engage in the kind of sound painting that composers use to enrich a text." Corinna...

When 1970s Boston Was A Hotbed Of Contemporary Music

In its own buttoned-up New England way, it was a modernist hotbed. Each of those institutions was like a little fief, with eminent composers on the faculty. Each maintained active student ensembles, including many devoted exclusively to new music. - The New York Times

The Saga Of The Jefferson Davis Chair Comes To An End (And No, It Wasn’t Really Used As A Toilet)

A shadowy art/activist collective calling itself White Lies Matter made a bit of a stir earlier this month when it stole a chair dedicated to the first and only president of the Confederate States from a cemetery in Selma, Alabama and threatened to turn it into a commode if their demands weren't met. Here's an explainer covering what exactly...

Nature Documentaries Are A Lot More Like Porn Than You’d Like To Think

It's not just that they're wildly popular and can be addictive. It's because nature documentaries have at least as much artifice as any studio-produced adult video and maybe more. ("Are these seabirds supposed to be majestic or comical as they enact their mating dance? The music tells us. Whom are we to root for in this interaction of predator...

The Surrealists Would Have Loved TikTok

In fact, reporter Angela Watercutter compares the 15-second-video service old Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse: "The platform, thanks to its duetting and stitching functions, automates a lot of what the Surrealists were doing. It' not exactly an exquisite corpse, since TikTok records the entire genealogy of any given work, and there is a want for continuity with what others have...

Where Second City’s New Chief Means To Lead The Improv Institution

Says Jon Carr, who came to the company's Chicago headquarters from Dad's Garage in Atlanta four months ago, "It's a little strange, because there’s nothing routine happening at any of right now, so it's a lot of rebuilding of things from scratch." - American Theatre

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