To perceive the outside world, our brain combines signals entering our brains through our eyes with what we expect the world to look like based on our past experiences. This means that our perception of the outside world is strongly influenced by what we believe. - Nautilus
When online surveyor YouGov conducted a survey asking over 8,000 US adults, “Do you believe that the Earth is round or flat?,” only 84 percent of respondents felt certain that the Earth is round. - LitHub
"From world-famous musicians to anonymous internet commentators, discrimination toward Asian musicians contains an ugly, common tenor: In this music, they will not replace us." - Van
Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over the simultaneous digital rollout of “Black Widow,” saying it breaches her contract with the company to release the film in theaters first. - Washington Post
"These days, dance brings me a deep pain and pronounced lack of joy that I never fathomed it could. The excitement with which I cheer on my friends as they return to in-person performances is mixed with a bitter and, dare I say, resentful sadness." - Dance Magazine
"His fall from grace in the mid-1950s was sudden and unexpected. From the mid-1930s he'd been the darling of the West End." Then along came the British theatre's Angry Young Men, followed by critic Kenneth Tynan, whose savaging torpedoed Rattigan's plays for a generation. - The Stage
The results of the survey are a snapshot of the art community’s struggle for financial stability even before COVID-19 shut down galleries and museums across the city. - Los Angeles Magazine
When Jeff Lowenfels began writing for the Anchorage Daily News in 1976, he had not expected that one day one of his readers would grow okra there. (The pod is native to Africa.) - The New York Times Magazine
The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum developed a way to provide guides when COVID kept them from coming in: visitors can stop at strategically placed monitors and talk with offsite docents in real time. Folks on both sides of the screen seem to love it. - Slate
In four short years, Netflix has done more to reshape the way that movies are made, distributed and consumed than perhaps any other single company in the history of the film business. - Variety
The compound at Austin Friars, known to readers of Hilary Mantel's trilogy, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. But a historian has used what's survived of Cromwell's own archives, along with later drawings and surveys, to work out a clearer idea of what it looked like. - CNN
Alas, the practice goes at least back to the days of jazz dance at the start of the 20th century, when the first legal battles over choreography were fought. - The Conversation
We can still see Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (which launched the genre) and Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (a reggae gangster pic and Jamaica's first feature film), but little else they directed. Luckily, Mario Van Peebles and Justine Henzell are addressing that. - The Guardian
His 42nd Street Ballroom, which has mesmerized passersby for decades at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, is but one of the 300 "audio-kinetic ball machines" that he created for museums, children's hospitals, transportation hubs, and the like. - The New York Times
The 3,500-year-old artifact, covered with cuneiform writing from the "dream" section of The Epic of Gilgamesh, is part of the enormous collection of objects acquired by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green that turn out to have been illegally looted. - Artnet