Tom Port believes that records are like snowflakes — no two are the same. So many things can impact the pressing, including room temperature, the split second the stampers are pressed onto the hot, vinyl biscuit, and unknown factors no human can understand. - Washington Post
He taught himself to play the lute while imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II, collected antique instruments, and recorded, as a singer, an LP that featured English lute songs alongside African-American spirituals. He even composed a lute song that he passed off as "Elizabethan." - Early Music America
"If you read his 1984 'carbuncle' speech in full, what follows might come as a surprise. Far from issuing a decree for more Corinthian columns and pumped-up pediments, he outlines principles that are now found in practically every best-practice design guide." - The Guardian
A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. - The Atlantic
"If these laws take effect, platforms will be forbidden from prohibiting or deprioritizing certain kinds of content — creating the potential for a future Twitter landscape" — or Facebook, Instagram, TikTok — "filled with hate, porn, terrorist recruitment, Holocaust denial, and really outlandish trolls." - Slate
“That was the problem. Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.” - The Guardian
What's up with the no clapping between movements - and, in 2022, is it time to make a compromise between the rowdy 18th century and the decorous 19th in order to ensure the music's survival farther into the 21st? - MSN (Boston Globe)
"This Documenta, unlike any before it, was not about art, or ideas, but about the friends we made along the way — the friends and, indeed, the enemies." - The New York Times
"I was privy to the click maps provided by newsletter services like Mailchimp; I added up likes and comments and shares and divided them by the number of literal eyeballs sliding over a post and thought I’d go crazy as I chased after “key performance indicators,” otherwise known as KPIs." - The Baffler
Our nation once idolized astronauts and civil-rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We acclaimed the power of technology, and so technology has gained the most power. - The Atlantic
‘Art is about allowing people not to have limits on their imaginations. So if audiences are starting to look for something political in the work that may or may not be there, and then they are interpreting it in those narrow terms, that’s a dangerous direction for art to be heading. It’s reducing art to propaganda.’ - ArtsHub
Price isn't the only barrier for a classical newcomer, but it's a big one, and the few American organizations that have tried pay-what-you-wish — most notably, the Chicago Sinfonietta and, this past summer, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra — say it works. But what about lost ticket revenue? - The New York Times
The tremendous success of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light) led to a reassessment of her other work (17 books in total, plus numerous stories and essays) that established her reputation of one of this century's greatest English-language novelists. - The Guardian
"While the streamers' appetite for documentary content has created a new golden age for nonfiction filmmaking, it's come with transformations that many find worrying: Doc subjects are being paid, timelines are getting scrunched, and the line between premium nonfiction and reality television is blurring." - The Hollywood Reporter
Deepfakes graduated from a looming threat to something an enterprising teenager can put together for a TikTok, and chatbots are occasionally sending their creators into crisis. - New York Magazine
The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found. Perhaps more surprising, the mediators drove consensus not by pushing their own interpretations, but by encouraging others to take the stage and then adjusting their own beliefs — and brain patterns. - The New York Times
“This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America. The effort, she said, “is ideologically motivated and politically expedient, and it needs to be understood as such in order to be confronted and addressed properly.” - The New York Times
The development means there is increased competition for photographers on what were traditionally called photography stock websites, but might be now better described as something else. - PetaPixel
"The new report by the Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) identified 108 medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan that were completely destroyed between 1997 and 2011 — an eradication." - Hyperallergic
I knew that if I merely retreated to my “side,” I would only contribute to the problem. With some trepidation, then, I set out to ask twelve scholars what they see as the main challenges facing literary studies and literary criticism today. - The Point
