For nearly half a century, Lévy has been one of the most visible public intellectuals in France and a master at manipulating philosophical and political controversy. With his good looks and outsized ego, Lévy is a compelling performer. He is also an irresistible target for critics from the left, right, and center. - Foreign Policy
"The state government flagging multimillion-dollar cuts for the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and Sydney Living Museums in budget forecasts." - The Sydney Morning Herald
"Feminist artist and LGBTQ+ activist Yulia Tsvetkova … was detained in November 2019 and remained under house arrest in Komsomolsk-on-Amur until March 16, faces up to six years behind bars if found guilty of illegally producing and distributing pornographic materials on the internet." - Artnet
Pushed by County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr., a Democrat, the New Opportunities for Tourism and Entertainment — or NOTE — Act would enable restaurants, bars and other businesses to hold live musical entertainment by amending zoning rules in areas where live music is currently prohibited. But residents and some council members are skeptical of how the county would enforce...
Successive Covid-19 lockdowns in France have given budding writers the time to finally work on that idea for a novel or to polish up an old manuscript languishing in a drawer. As a result, publishers are overwhelmed. Before the pandemic, Gallimard received around 30 manuscripts a day; now they receive around 50. - Yahoo!
How completely has streaming transformed the music world? The platform rose from 7% of the U.S. market in 2010 to a whopping 83% by the end of 2020 — and recorded-music revenues saw their fifth consecutive year of growth, topping $12.2 billion, per the RIAA. It’s no understatement to say that streaming saved the record- ed-music business, and that...
One of the distinctive features of my cognition is that not only do I think with sound and music; I also don’t think in images during my waking hours (although I dream vividly and visually at night). This lack of visual imagery is known as aphantasia, partial in my case. - Aeon
New research by a British linguistic anthropologist, Gordon Whittaker, is revealing for the first time that the Aztecs' hieroglyphic writing system was one of the most sophisticated scripts that humanity has ever produced. - The Independent (UK)
Novelist Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) writes about the strange case of Sarmad Khoosat's film Zindagi Tamasha ("Circus of Life"), which has won multiple prizes at international festivals, was cleared by three Pakistani boards of censors, made the country's official entry for the Best International Film Oscar, glommed onto as a political football by people who hadn't...
The idea that the world’s two most powerful countries can simply “decouple” as their strategic competition grows fiercer — a concept promoted by China hawks — doesn’t match reality. In the case of classical music, as Beethoven in Beijing illustrates, the ties that bind our two countries are historically driven and deeply emotional. - Philadelphia Inquirer
"Ancient stories, and texts that have stood the test of time, can be portals to honest and dignified grappling with present wounds and longings and callings that we aren't able to muster in our official places now. It's an embodiment of the good Greek word catharsis — releasing both insight and emotions that have had no place to go,...
"Just as an example, when I put a post on Facebook that I was looking for someone to help clean my house, I got at least 50 replies from artists that I've seen on stage and people that I've worked with. I also know of artists who have been in the profession for many years who have had to...
In something of a miracle, the huge fire that ravaged the Paris landmark on April 15, 2019 did almost no serious damage to the 8,000-pipe Grand Organ; the major problem is that lead dust from the melted roof covered and coated every part of the instrument, and cleaning up a neurotoxin is no easy matter. But of the smaller...
Markus Buehler’s team used laser imaging to create a 3D map of webs made by tropical tent-web spiders (Cyrtophora citricola). They identified each thread’s vibrating frequency through its size and elasticity, then converted those frequencies into ones that can be heard by humans. - New Scientist
There are two fundamental problems with Esperanto as a genuinely global lingua franca. One is that, while it was intended to be have grammar simple and intuitive enough to be mastered quickly, Esperanto is really only intuitive for speakers of European languages; its grammar is alien to native speakers of, for instance, Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, or Tamil. The other...
