Two of them, Idagio and Primephonic, have been created specifically for classical music listeners. The other four, Apple Music, Qobuz, Spotify and Tidal, cover all genres. As we’ll see, there are many different aspects to these services: their look and feel on the phone and the desktop, how you search, what audio quality they provide, their different ways of...
Converting "qualities to quantities”, replacing “critical evaluation with economic, technical evaluation”, making “the price system” the ultimate judge, turning institutions into markets and individuals into competing contestants are all hallmarks of the neoliberal vision of a more efficient, productive society. They also characterise quite a lot of what is going on in the art world at the moment. -...
Such quirky, esoteric mash-ups feel less like stylistic innovations and more like branding exercises, reflecting a present in which one’s ability to market oneself is more important than mastering a craft or coming up with fresh ideas. - The Spectator
“Are we going to come out of this moment with a new model or new models? No. But what if we were in a constant state of evolving our model? What if we didn’t do what we just did … and get so entrenched in it that getting out of it and moving past becomes this national conversation and...
In 1302, caught on the wrong side in one of Florence's perpetual factional struggles, Dante Alighieri was fined and banished on a probably trumped-up charge of corruption in political office; summoned home from Ravenna the following year, he refused to come, and his sentence was commuted to death by burning. Now Dante's great-great-many-times-great-grandson, astrophysicist Sperello di Serego Alighieri, is...
Just as journalistic embargoes aren’t universally bad or unprofessional, academic embargoes might not be either. But conversations about the ethics of “access scholarship” are far less mature than debates about “access journalism.” (Though such journalism still dominates cultures of political reporting, it at least has a name and prominent critics.) - NiemanLab
"Across the city, amateur and professional dancers are donning sneakers, masks and lots of layers to carry on with a familiar ritual that, for many, is essential to maintaining physical and mental health. … For the most part, have endured without interruption, a consistency that speaks to dancers' desire to be physically present together, not cooped up in...
"We inhabit a dystopian reality, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction. Yet the novels of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell continue to cast a powerful spell. All of them end in defeat for the protagonists, but in each case a possibility of revolt remains." - New Statesman
Says classical music editor Zachary Woolfe (who came up with the idea in the shower), "It has doubled our audience for classical music. It's gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it." - The New York Times
There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion...
"The pandemic closed the city on March 13, the eve of the opening of Miami New Drama's first musical. To keep the 5-year-old company going, Hausmann … commissioned seven notable playwrights — five Latino or Latina, two Black — to write short works that would fit under the 'Seven Deadly Sins' rubric. … Guides led audience groups of...
Dan-el Padilla Peralta's "vision of classics’ complicity in systemic injustice is uncompromising, even by the standards of some of his allies. He has condemned the field as “equal parts vampire and cannibal” — a dangerous force that has been used to murder, enslave and subjugate. “He’s on record as saying that he’s not sure the discipline deserves a future,”...
"Finding your thrills in erotic literature, rather than in video scenes, might take a little longer, but it means caring more about the characters involved, which brings more meaning to the sexual scenes," says totally unbiased erotica author Max Sebastian. "I'm not sure than any other literary genre or visual media honestly appreciates male sexuality the way that erotica...
"On its face this list is a little concerning — in a few years, robots might render humans' book-recommending jobs obsolete. I, a human with a book-recommending job, am indeed a little concerned. But if humans aren't stepping up to do the necessary work of recommending 67 books to give a woman, I'm not going to tell a...
Streaming services thoroughly dominate the roster: Hulu took 9 nominations, Amazon Studios 10, and Netflix a whopping 42. Among notable details: Tom Hanks and Spike Lee were snubbed, and of the five nominated directors, three are women. (For a complete list of nominations, click here.) - Variety
