The internet is as much part of our utilities as water and electricity. The shutdown in this globally linked economy is destructive, and only part of that is planned: "In addition to stifling speech, communication, and digital rights, the indiscriminate internet blackouts are destroying Myanmar's economy, halting pandemic-related remote schooling, and disrupting health care." - Wired
One 53-year-old paramedic said, "I'd never written a song before. ... But I came home from work and said: 'I need to write this down.' I sat down, wrote some lyrics and put together a melody on my guitar. Putting it down on paper… I definitely found that helped." - BBC
Hello, freedom of artistic expression? Nope. Trademark protection - for both Satan and, perhaps, Jesus shoes: "MSCHF asserts that just like an earlier limited-edition of Jesus Shoes, these will be displayed in artistic collections, perhaps in museums. (In court papers, Nike has left open the possibility of amending its complaint to include a claim over Jesus Shoes, too.)"...
Sort of. "Still, how these works fare on practical levels — such as WiFi reliability and technical mastery of a visual medium — reveals the Internet as bumpy terrain for a field that breathes more naturally in shared public air." - Washington Post
Yuh-Jung Youn didn't have acting on her life plan. "The self-taught thespian never envisioned a life in the performing arts. Her international breakthrough seems to her, like everything else along the way, fortuitous. 'It’s embarrassing,' she said. 'Most people fell in love with the movies or fell in love with theater. But in my case it was just an...
"The idea behind NFTs was, and is, profound. Technology should be enabling artists to exercise control over their work, to more easily sell it, to more strongly protect against others appropriating it without permission. By devising the technology specifically for artistic use, McCoy and I hoped we might prevent it from becoming yet another method of exploiting creative professionals....
"More than 25 Los Angeles area theater companies, including the Geffen Playhouse, the Pasadena Playhouse and the Deaf West Theatre, have revoked their memberships in the L.A. Stage Alliance after the nonprofit organization misidentified and mispronounced the name of Asian actress Jully Lee at an awards show earlier this week." - Deadline
“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.” - IEEE Spectrum
Pitch is an abstraction: any given note doesn’t have a real-world referent. The existence of flutes that produce a family of fixed notes, however, suggests a developed tonal system of patterns and scales, a sense of right notes and wrong notes, a cultural and musical identity. This has evolutionary as well as cultural significance. - Literary Review
Is authenticity fading away as a personal ethic or is it something everyone wants to be? In fact, both are true – because the meaning of authenticity is changing. - Psyche
Venue operators are using their enforced downtime to scrub, buff and do major reconfigurations. In some cases, the work was commissioned and started before COVID-19. Toronto’s iconic Massey Hall, for example, closed in 2018 for a $135-million renovation that was scheduled to be completed as soon as this year, but now there’s not such a hurry. - The Globe...
Good old-fashioned letters, it turns out. Choreographer and educator Suchi Branfman has been running her Dancing Through Prison Walls project with inmates of the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco since 2016. She was not going to let the pandemic make her abandon her students, but they didn't have access to Zoom. So they started writing to each other. Garnet...
Ballet is often seen as the glorification of women -but, wherever it stands now, it condoned and encouraged the sexual trafficking of women for most of its history: a factor to which no history of ballet has given enough attention. - Alastair Macaulay
The standards for heating, ventilation and air conditioning at North American and European museums tend to be quite high: minimizing airborne dust and maintaining consistent air temperature, humidity, and circulation are crucial for keeping the items on display in good condition. So the upgrades necessary to keep airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus low have been relatively simple to...
The conclusion from these finds is that people in the African interior weren’t lagging behind coastal cultures at all. Some of the most important innovations in human prehistory happened in multiple areas of the continent at around the same time. - Ars Technica
