Are there biological or other scientific causes for our moral beliefs? If so, how does that affect our moral beliefs and choices? It's a bit complex: "Our evolutionary conditioning might have made it impossible for us to acquire knowledge of objective moral truths, even if they exist. The other is that our evolved psychology might make it impossible in any...
"The manuscript, Murder at Full Moon, was completed in 1930 but was never published. A single copy has been sitting, mostly forgotten, in an archive in Texas since 1969. It includes drawings by Steinbeck himself. A scholar of American literature at Stanford University is pushing for the book to be published, but the agents for Steinbeck's estate vehemently refused...
Gotta keep those subscriber numbers up with direct to streaming movies! But ... how do agents, producers, directors, and actors feel about this? It's not ideal right now: "Talent typically has little leverage should a studio decide to put a title onto a streaming service, sources say. It did not readily occur to either agents or studios that contracts...
Philip Kennicott: "The new members aren't just visionaries with a firm command of inspiring rhetoric; they know how to read a plan, look at a model, scrutinize a drawing and make precise comments about the small questions of design, materials, spacing, proportion and light. … Rather than simply assess the impact and design of selected federal projects, most of...
"Even in Petit's home country, his works haven't been staged with great regularity. Nor do companies seem especially interested in resuscitating any of the dozens of full-length works or shorter ballets he created over the course of a long career. It's a curious schism: Despite the relative obscurity of much of Petit's work, he remains much-revered in France, where...
The amount of money people are spending on music hasn't changed from when we bought albums at the record store or CDs by Sony subscription service - but the way musicians get the money, and how much money they get, is radically different. "When we talk about per stream rates, what we’re doing is sort of smushing all of...
"As a professor at American University in Washington, where he joined the faculty in 1970, Dr. Larson taught some of the first classes offered to U.S. students on African writers. At a time when the literary canon consisted almost entirely of works by British and American authors, he helped secure a place in American academia for writers including ...
The app - long derided both for squelching LGBTQIA voices and exploiting Black creators - reacted to the George Floyd protests by starting an incubator for Black voices. How's it working now? "Program members bonded. ... They shared legal advice, sample media kits, tips on talking to potential agents or collaboration partners and the stresses of turning a hobby...
Not only are audience members (at a quarter of pre-COVID capacity) required to stay six feet from each other, so are all the actors and crew. That's presenting quite a traffic management puzzle for director Sean Homes as he restages his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Elizabethan theatre's reopening. - The New York Times
Simon V.Z. Wood: "Searching for evidence that bad actors were weaponizing artificial intelligence for political gain, what I found instead was an emerging field of detection firms, government grantees, startups, academics, artists, and nonprofits that seemed to depend on one another to sustain interest in deepfakes. Call it the deepfake-industrial complex — or, perhaps, a solution in search of...
In the wake of Bob Garfield's firing from On the Media for what he's described as "anger mismanagement," Celeste Headlee — who endured mistreatment on and off the air as co-host of The Takeaway with the now-disgraced John Hockenberry — writes, "There is no such thing as a host who is 'too big to fail.' Executives in the past...
"Robert L. Lynch, the longtime president and chief executive of the Washington-based advocacy organization Americans for the Arts who had been on paid leave since December amid workplace complaints, has agreed to retire effective immediately, the organization's board announced Thursday." - The New York Times
A Facebook post in late April from an alumna of Venezuela's famous system of free musical education "has since sparked a collective portrait of teenage girls in El Sistema being systematically groomed by older male teachers, with coercive innuendos and propositions as everyday occurrences." Said one former student of her oboe teacher, "His methods rested on an uplifting discourse...
"The long-awaited Barcelona branch has finally been given the green light for development. The port of Barcelona's board of directors announced on Thursday that a proposal for the Hermitage Barcelona was approved, despite considerable resistance from the city authorities. The building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Toyo Ito, is slated to open in 2024." - ARTnews
"The Australian Ballet forfeited $32 million in ticket revenue for 2020, a pandemic blow that it has only survived thanks to an outpouring of community and government support, plus a decision to raid its reserves and sell off investments. … It bucks the trend of many other major arts organisations including Victorian Opera, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and...
