M+ seemed inevitable, so right. But if you looked closely enough, divisions between the city and its various cultural saviours were starting to emerge. - Apollo
Optimization cannot reconcile people’s conflicting world views. Though conflict has always been the meat of politics, political differences today mean that people not only disagree over solutions and precise settings of valuation parameters; they also clash over the fundamental terms. - Boston Review
In the old college system there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum. - The New Yorker
As devastating as the pandemic has been to lives and livelihoods, a number of opera singers have found themselves emerging back into live performance with careers in better, more interesting places than they were when the shutdown began. - NPR
No one in the music world has been more ambitious or creative in exploring the ways musicians can create soundscapes in dialogue with the surrounding world. And he has been doing it for decades, all over the globe, from Siberia to the Grand Canyon. - Ted Gioia
Anthony Freud's term was to have expired this year; in October, LOC's board extended it for five years with no public announcement. When asked, the company has given no reason for the silence. Freud's management has come under increasing criticism in recent years. - Chicago Classical Review
We consistently see that longer education does raise our cognitive abilities: a person’s IQ gains one to five points for each additional year of education. The evidence also suggests these effects aren’t just flashes in the pan: they last throughout our lives. - The Guardian
The longtime music director of the Vancouver Symphony (2000-2018) has been the RI Phil's artistic advisor since 2018, and he is also music director of the Sarasota Orchestra and chief conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra. - Newport Buzz
Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled. A message on the screen read: “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.” - The New York Times
"Could the new wave of Zen editors and e-ink tablets, tempering tech solutionism with analog nostalgia, reverse this trajectory — and give writers a dedicated device of our own?" Julian Lucas gives some of them a try. - The New Yorker
Although the term is less than 400 years old, the phenomenon of propaganda is far older. The pyramids of Egypt, to take one example, are propagandistic, attesting to the power of the Pharaohs who could enslave thousands of people to erect them. - 3 Quarks Daily
Her music has been more widely performed, some of her sonic meditations — for example, "Take a walk at night. Walk so slowly that the bottoms of your feet become ears." — have gone viral, and her concept of deep listening has spread. - Texas Observer
Not-for-profit theatres contributed nearly $2.1 billion to the U.S. economy and attracted 23 million attendees, according to Theatre Facts 2020. SMU Data Arts
"The project … melds robotics, AI and archaeology in an attempt to reconstruct architectural features of Pompeii that would otherwise remain incomplete, because they're either too complex or would require impossible amounts of human labor and time." - Scientific American
The Company Members (current and former artists who are the legal owners of the troupe) say they never intended Circus Oz to close. The Board says the Members knew that, if they rejected proposed governance changes (which they did), government funding would be cut entirely. - The Guardian
