"His prolific career spanned more than six decades, with over 100 completed buildings erected. ... The bold, helical Art Tower Mito in Japan, the Sidra tree-inspired Qatar National Convention Center in Doha and the Palau Saint Jordi, created for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, are among his best-known works." - CNN
The word “information” predates Gutenberg. But once printing took off and books proliferated, new kinds of books had to be invented to track, organize and summarize the relentless flood of data they generated: encyclopedias, bibliographies, dictionaries, multilingual bibles, summaries, herbals. - The Wall Street Journal
"This long-lost urban web encompassed nearly 1,000 settlements across 650 square miles, linked by an immense causeway system, which was mapped out with airborne laser instruments, known as LiDAR." - Vice
The danger of the current moment is a second hollowing: the relegation of even lower-budget productions to commercial oblivion, the ever-widening gap between the spectacular successes and the quiet failures. In a way, the industry has done itself in, aesthetically. - The New Yorker
"Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That's the nature of the beast. ... No doubt you'll say: How could that movie have been left off the list? Or this one? Or that one? Trust us: We often asked that very same question ourselves." - Variety
The new limitations of his body became an opportunity for renewal. There is a lesson here about what it means to care for the body, to inhabit the bodies we have not merely with acceptance and love, as we are often rightly advised to do. - The New York Times
"Hit hard by a cash shortfall and lackluster ticket sales ..., the (company) said Monday that it would withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment, give fewer performances next season, and accelerate its embrace of contemporary works, which, in a shift, have been outselling the classics." - The New York Times
"What happens when an ad agency and a greeting card company make a TV show?" In this case, Hallmark Playhouse, the Hallmark Hall of Fame (and its 81 Emmy Awards), and, ultimately, the Hallmark Channel and its iconic Christmas programming. - Tedium
Over time, laughter-inducing play transformed into practical uses: Laughter and amusement signified a situation was safe, and positive emotions could be used to help cheer others up. Then, around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago humor evolved to serve more modern applications. - Vox
In the 1950s, TV networks broadcast light operas by Victor Herbert and Kurt Weill. Those pieces are rarely revived now; neither are the comic works of Anthony Davis and William Bolcom, and there are composers today who could write more. We just need a company for them. - The New York Times
Recent video from Ukraine shows a bulldozer tearing down the back of the ruined theater, which Russian fighter planes bombed last March while hundreds of families were sheltering in its basement; over 300 people died. The city's mayor, currently in exile, says the occupiers plan to leave the façade intact. - BBC
"The vandals entered Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain (in South Australia) and scrawled graffiti across the heritage-listed site, writing 'don't look now, but this is a death cave'. Authorities say the vandals dug under a steel gate to gain access to the site." - The Guardian
These systems are master imitators of human creativity. They have been trained on millions upon millions of human artifacts such as documents, articles, drawings, paintings, movies, or whatever else can be stored in databases at scale. - Big Think
It wasn’t Frank Capra or Jimmy Stewart or the enduring power of cinema that made it a lasting success. It was neglect. “The damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra himself once said. - The Wall Street Journal
This month saw the inauguration of Jashn-e-Rekhta, an annual three-day festival devoted to Urdu verse, old and new. Attendance was over 300,000 —notwithstanding the fact that Urdu, while very, very closely related to Hindi, is commonly associated with Islam in a country awash in Hindu nationalism. - The New York Times
"The Guardian took every Christmas song that had charted in the UK Top 100 since 1952, and selected the 100 most popular of those on Spotify. Two-thirds were released at least 30 years ago." Which is to say: "all we want for Christmas is mid-20th-century nostalgia." - The Guardian
Beauty is what we find, create, and propagate, either through imitation – creating a copy, another iteration – or through distribution of the thing itself. - Psyche
We don’t need more itinerant maestros who draw big salaries in multiple cities. We need more directorships along the lines of ones in which a conductor focusses on a single city and puts down roots. This is how American orchestral culture unfolded before jet travel. _ The New Yorker
Taraneh Alidoosti, 38, posted messages on social media supporting the protests after Iranian authorities executed a 23-year-old prisoner. "'Your silence means supporting oppression and oppressors,' she wrote." - The New York Times
The list is broken out into the top 20 large communities and the top 10 each of medium-sized and small communities. Because of the unpredictable and uneven nature of recovery from COVID-related shutdowns, this year the list is not ranked. - SMU Data Arts
