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As The Authorities Drop Mask and Vaccination Requirements For Indoor Spaces, Should The Arts Do The Same?

"In interviews, leaders of almost a dozen cultural groups across the country emphasized the need for caution and carefulness. But they noted that each of their situations are distinct." - The New York Times

Why We’re Built To Forget

It used to be thought that forgetting anything — from minor things like the name of a casual acquaintance to the more painful loss of cherished memories experienced by my patients — was caused, to varying degrees, by a failure of the brain’s memory mechanisms. But new developments in neuroscience over the past decade or so refute this simple...

Tracking The Word Choice Vectors In Rap Music

There’s an appealingly simple sociolinguistic view, one my grizzled inner skeptic appears to have embraced, whereby words function as vectors of status: where vocabulary and diction map faithfully to acculturation and lifestyle, where every social stratum has its vernacular and every vernacular its social stratum.  - LitHub

Ken Robinson: What Does Education Mean Now?

What does it mean to be educated now? As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. - Edutopia

Geffen Hall Is Fully Funded And Will Open Year Early

The project’s leaders announced on Wednesday that they had raised their goal of $550 million to cover the cost of the renovation, and that the hall will reopen to the public in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule. - The New York Times

How Did Intelligence Evolve Biologically?

The processes of intelligence are so intricate, so multilayered and baroque, no wonder some people might be tempted by stories about a top-down Creator. But we know evolution must have been able to come up with intelligence on its own, from the bottom up. - Aeon

100 Years After It Sank, Shackleton’s Ship Found In Antarctica (and In Remarkable Condition)

The Endurance was found off the coast of Antarctica, approximately four miles south of the position originally recorded by its captain, Frank Worsley. It has not been seen since it was crushed by ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in November 1915. - The Guardian

Russia Used Interpol To Get Italy To Arrest Ukrainian Opera Director

"Yevhen (Eugene) Lavrenchuk was imprisoned in Naples for more than two months after Russia issued a call for his arrest through Interpol's 'red notice'" for fugitive criminals; he was released after Italy's justice minister intervened. (Until last year, Lavrenchuk was the controversial artistic director at Odesa's opera house.) - The Guardian

Arts Venues Sue Small Business Administration Over COVID Money

Nearly 50 rejected venue grant applicants have taken the SBA to court, including escape rooms, a dance convention, a circus arts company, a ministry, a Manhattan jazz club, a “pet event” organizer and Michigan’s state fair. About fifteen cases have been resolved, with $52.7 million in venue grants awarded to those businesses. - Crosscut

How Little Has Survived Of Medieval European Literature? More, And Less, Than One Might Expect

"A team using techniques more commonly used to track wildlife estimates that 68 percent of chivalric and heroic works produced in medieval Europe survive today. For individual manuscripts, or handwritten copies of literary works, that figure drops to 9 percent." - Smithsonian Magazine

Is Having Two Museum Directors Better Than Having One?

“There’s a lot of structural change underway and nobody knows where this is going. I think there’s a strong desire from all the actors to rethink how these institutions should run.” - Artnet

A Different Way To Approach Deciphering Quipu, The Incas’ Knotted-String Language?

Scholar Silvia Ferrara suggests that — since we don't have a Rosetta Cord giving us a text side-by-side in Inca knots and Spanish letters — we take an approach something like the way Amy Adams's linguist character in Arrival deciphered the aliens' squid-ink emissions. - Literary Hub

How To Fight Disinformation

So is a country’s level of media literacy anything more than a measure of the wealth and the education of its population? How can we tell if a country’s disinformation curriculum is the reason its population is relatively protected against online falsehoods? - The New York Times

Belarus Free Theatre Does Its First Show Together Since Fleeing The Country Last Fall

In the wake of the stolen presidential election and Lukashenko's vicious crackdown on the subsequent demonstrations, the underground troupe decided to go into exile. Now they're in London to stage a production that premiered two years ago in Minsk and is now more timely than ever. - The Independent (UK)

Careful Of Boycotting Russian Artists and Institutions. It’s Difficult To Come Back

"Almost on the hour, we’re hearing about cultural boycotts, departures of curators and directors, and the shuttering of institutions. The moral convictions behind these choices cannot be doubted. Yet I feel compelled to caution about cutting ties too rashly, and with no clear pathway back to normalcy." - Artnet

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