“Our information crisis can and should be treated like a virus. Responding to fake stories or conspiracy theories after the fact is woefully insufficient, just as post-infection treatments don’t compare to vaccines. Indeed, a growing body of social science suggests that fact-checks and debunkings do little to correct falsehoods after people have seen a piece of misinformation (the unintentional spread of misleading or false stories) or disinformation (the intentional spread of such a story with a purpose in mind). Sander Van der Linden believes we can protect people against bad information through something akin to inoculation. A truth vaccine. He calls this tactic “prebunking.” – Rolling Stone
German Study: Concerts, Museums, Performances In Theatres Are Safer Than Other Indoor Activities
The researchers found that if kept at 30% capacity with everyone wearing a mask and following proper precautions, museums, theaters, and operas are safer than any other activity studied. In museums, the R-value stands at 0.5 compared to 0.6 in hair salons and 0.8 in public transportation. – Hyperallergic
How Memory And The Passage Of Time Fold On Top Of One Another
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrung meaning from time. Each day is so like the former. April disappeared entirely; Thanksgiving feels as close, or faraway, as last June. I no longer can keep track of the dates; time has become a pool of standing water. – Psyche
How Novels Can Help Plan Our Way Through COVID Recovery
As sources for possible future scenarios capable of providing strategic foresight, or producing alternative future plans, novels can also help businesses create dialogue on difficult and even taboo subjects. Novels are, therefore, capable of helping managers become better, providing them with creative insight and wisdom. Science fiction can provide a means to explore morality tales, a warning of possible futures, in an attempt to help us avoid or rectify that future. – The Conversation
A Life Listening To Jazz: W. Royal Stokes
No one could have predicted Stokes’s zigzag jazz life, including him. Born in D.C. in 1930, he was a teen obsessed with boogie-woogie records; then a student turned professor of Greek and Latin languages and literature and ancient history; then a turned-on-tuned-in-dropped-out hippie roadtripper; then a volunteer radio DJ; then a voracious music scribe who published his first jazz review at age 42; thena freelance jazz critic for The Washington Post and, later, an editor at JazzTimes magazine. – Washington Post
The World’s Largest Bach Website, Brought To You By A Computer Engineer In Tel Aviv
The Bach Cantatas Website, founded 20 years ago by Aryeh Oron, includes texts from Bach’s sacred works in multiple languages, discographies, history and analysis of each piece, and many other resources. It gets 15,000-20,000 hits a day and is used even by the likes of John Eliot Gardiner and Masaaki Suzuki, two of the world’s leading Bach conductors. – Haaretz (Israel)
Is It Time… Finally… To Kill The Book Blurb?
In 1936, George Orwell claimed that “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers” was causing the public to turn away from novels altogether. “Novels are being shot at you at the rate of fifteen a day,” he wrote in an essay, “and every one of them an unforgettable masterpiece which you imperil your soul by missing.” – The Wall Street Journal
Literature Is A Technology, And It Should Be Taught Like One
Neuroscientist-turned-English-professor Angus Fletcher: “It’s a machine designed to work in concert with another machine, our brain. The purpose of the two machines is to accelerate each other. … We’ve been taught in school to interpret literature, to say what it means, to identify its themes and arguments. But when you do that, you’re working against literature. I’m saying we need to find these technologies, these inventions, and connect them to your head, see what they can do for your brain.” – Nautilus
Race, Privilege, And Values Collide At Smith College
“This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.” – The New York Times
Lessons From The Explosion Of Online Dance During The Pandemic
“With audiences and funders generally letting dancers decide what (and how much) to produce while distancing requirements are in place, the incentive to go virtual appears almost wholly self-imposed. … More than anything else, peer pressure is what led so many companies to produce so much content so early — setting a pace difficult to sustain as the pandemic wore on.” – Dance Magazine
Was This Picture Painted By A Human Or By AI? Most Folks Can’t Tell, Finds Study
“A majority of respondents were only able to identify one of the five AI landscape works as such. Around 75 to 85 percent of respondents guessed wrong on the other four. When they did correctly attribute an artwork to AI, it was the abstract one.” – Artnet
Former Producer Accuses KCRW Of Systemic Racism
Cerise Castle said in a podcast interview and on social media on Monday that her time at KCRW was “marked by microaggressions, gaslighting, and blatant racism starting when I was physically prevented from entering the building multiple times within my first month of employment.” – Los Angeles Times
Gov’t Shuts Down Hungary’s Last Independent Radio Station
“When the faithful listeners to Klubrádió, a talk radio station that has been a beacon of free speech in Hungary, tuned in last Monday, February 15, they found only silence. … As an open forum for public discourse, Klubrádió has challenged a range of government policies, including those bearing on public memory and press freedom.” – The Nation
Whatever The Pandemic May Have Thrown At You, There’s A German Word For It
“Over the past year, German has coined some 1,000-plus new terms endemic to the Now Times. … And that’s thanks to the language’s rules of compound noun formation, which dictate that you can make a new, longer legitimate word out of almost any existing ones.” Germanist and recovering academic Rebecca Schuman is our guide. – Slate
As They Stream Their Work, Theater Companies Find A New, Far-Flung Public
“Across the country, and beyond its borders, many theaters say new audiences for their streaming offerings has been an unexpected silver lining — one that could have ramifications for the industry even after it is safe to perform live again and presenters try to return patrons to their seats.” – The New York Times
Silas Farley, 26, Will Be Dean Of Dance At Colburn School In L.A.
Farley raised eyebrows last June when he retired from New York City Ballet at such a young age, but he had already been choreographing and teaching for for more than a decade and wanted to do more of it. Now he will — and his associate dean, running the business side of things will be Darleen Callaghan, who was his very first dance teacher. – Los Angeles Times
Collection Worth $400 Million Donated To Seattle Art Museum
“[The gift is] 19 20th-century abstract expressionist and European masterworks — including those by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning — from the Lang Collection, once owned by the late Medina philanthropists Jane Lang Davis and Richard E. Lang. The gift also includes an additional $10.5 million in dedicated funds for the museum.” – The Seattle Times
COVID Killed Two-Thirds Of All Arts And Recreation Jobs In NYC
“Employment in New York City’s arts, entertainment and recreation sector plummeted by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020, according to a report released on Wednesday by the New York State Comptroller’s office.” The study “said that the sector had seen the largest drop of all the parts of the city’s economy.” – The New York Times
Brexit Is Far More Damaging Than COVID, Say British Theatre And Dance Companies
Says the executive producer at one major troupe, “Brexit will have the bigger impact because it’s a long-term restriction. We’re a flexible, dynamic sector and can work our way out of COVID – but if we can’t produce and export our work, that’s going to have a devastating effect.” – The Guardian
Van Gogh Painting Unseen For More Than 130 Years Now On View
“A Street Scene In Montmartre has been owned by a French family for most of the time since it was painted in 1887. Sotheby’s estimates it could fetch up to eight million euros (£6.9m) when it is sold at auction next month.” – BBC
The Relativity Switch
This story may sound like a metaphor. But it’s actually a case-in-point. – Andrew Taylor
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Dies at 101; His Pictures of a Gone World Remain
A literary era passes. It was already past, yet it still has influence. My account is minimal in the scheme of things but here ‘tiz anyhow, excerpted from My Adventures in Fugitive Litrichur. – Jan Herman
Jazz beats the virus online
Chicago presenters of jazz and new music, and journalists from Madrid to the Bay Area, vocalist Kurt Elling, trumpeter Orbert Davis and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist discussed how they’ve transcended coronavirus-restrictions on live performances in two Zoom panels I moderated last week. – Howard Mandel