"With American traffic fatalities recently hitting a 15-year high, an infotainment arms race seems like the last thing we need right now. The car industry is poised to give us one anyway." And the systems are more or less unregulated. - Slate
It was only with the emergence of an artistic movement, beginning around the mid-18th century, that probable language came to be regarded less as the building blocks of composition and more as the too-familiar, the outworn, the boring. - Aeon
Her Ballet Nègre in Chicago, founded in 1930, was only the second ballet company of any kind in America. Her revues Tropics and Le Jazz "Hot" became Broadway hits. Katherine Dunham Dance Company toured the world and supported a school — and she handled the finances herself. - Forbes
I believe there exists a modicum of groupthink in an established expert community; solidarity in opinions may be seen as desirable among some in the scientific community, sometimes at the expense of intellectual debates and scientific discourse. - Future
"An unusually large proportion of the 10 plays opening this fall are what one producer calls ‘formally inventive’ and others might label downtown, avant-garde, or (that dread word) challenging." Jesse Green considers three of them: Is This a Room?, Dana H., and Pass Over. - The New York Times
In a world dominated by Netflix, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter, the idea of using theatre to drive change and inform our political life may seem naïve, even quaint. But theatre offers something none of these platforms can: space. - American Theatre
Miguel Gutierrez's Are You for Sale? explores "the ethical entanglements between art and money": the convoluted systems of philanthropy and grant applications, the good and bad points of state funding, "these horrible, infantilizing roles that the economic conditions of making work impose onto us." - The New York Times
Though a wide range of A.I. technologies have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, even the most impressive systems have ended up complementing human workers rather than replacing them. - The New York Times
The oldest surviving collection of riddles assembled in English is in the Exeter Book, copied around the turn of the first millennium CE. They were part of an extended English tradition of aenigmae and trick questions in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. - The New York Times
Thorsten A. Integrity (né Shayne Bushfield) of the trivia site LearnedLeague explains what he has to consider: Is this too hard? Too easy? Is it interesting? Is it accurate? Are there other ways to answer this question? Which part should be the question and which the answer? - Slate
From his teens, he astonished the great musicians he met with his recall of details, and for five decades he shared that knowledge as a historian, educator, concert promoter, Grammy-winning record producer, and legendary radio host at New York's WKCR. - The Washington Post
One historical site was blown to bits, but most performance spaces came out with only some roof and water damage. Yet the performers themselves are reeling: the storm and the Delta variant coronavirus killed the first chances they've had to work in months. - The New York Times
Some museums, like the Whitney, learned the hard way (during construction, Superstorm Sandy dumped six million gallons of water into the basement); others (like the Pérez in Miami, right alongside Biscayne Bay) see the danger and build in flood defenses. - Artnet
