For the past few years, scientists have been telling us that there’s not really any such thing as multitasking – that the best the human nervous system can manage is very fast task-switching, and that we get better results by concentrating on one thing at a time. Turns out there are a few exceptions – and researchers have been putting some of those individuals in a brain scanner.
Black Directors And Filmmakers Flip The Script With Public Twitter Discussion
“Academy Award nominee director Ava DuVernay, founder of the African American Film Releasing Movement (AFFRM), organized a massive ‘Rebel-a-Thon.’ The online event included the voices of 43+ black filmmakers—some well known, like Debbie Allen and Malcolm D. Lee.”
Dean Sends ‘USC7’ MFA Group Another Letter
“As the USC students and the administration go back and forth over what promises were and were not kept, a larger debate now rages about the future of art in education.”
Margaret Atwood Is First Author To Write For A Library That Won’t Be Read For 100 Years
“The Toronto-based Man Booker Prize winner is the first author to hand over an unpublished piece to the Future Library in Oslo. The international project will see one writer contribute a new, unread text to the collection every year for the next 100 years. The pieces will be kept locked up until 2114, when 1,000 trees planted for the project in a forest just outside Oslo will be cut down to provide paper for their publication.”
Musical Theatre For The Deaf
Musicals may seem like a counterintuitive choice for a deaf theater company, but they aren’t uncommon for Deaf West, one of the few theater groups in the country led by a deaf artistic director, in its case DJ Kurs.
Artist-Friendly Portland Rents Are Pricing Out Artists
“Portland has long been an incubator for artists looking for a vibrant and supportive community—minus the high cost of living in larger cities like Seattle and San Francisco. But a perfect storm of decreased development during the recession, and increased in-migration in the years following, has transformed Portland into a place where artists like Abernathy are being priced out as rents continue to rise.”
Did Bluesman Robert Johnson Really Sell His Soul To The Devil?
“Blues musician Robert Johnson is that grand rarity in the music world—a recording artist from the 1930s who can sell millions of records in the modern day. He left his stamp on the work of almost every later blues musician… But the rumors of Johnson’s dealings with the Devil are even more famous than his recordings. I’ve found that people who know nothing else about the blues, have often heard that story.”
How Machine “Deep Learning” Will Change The Things Around Us
“Deep learning is particularly interesting because it has transformed so many different areas of research. In the past researchers used very separate techniques for speech recognition, image recognition, translation, and robotics. But now one this one set of techniques—though a rather broad set—can serve all these fields.”
Who Knew? Musicians Union Sues Hollywood Studios For Reusing Music In Movies
“For instance, 1 minute and 10 seconds of music from Titanic was allegedly used in This Means War; 47 seconds of music from Die Hard and 30 seconds of music from The Bourne Identity was allegedly used in episodes of The Office; 18 seconds of music from Jaws was allegedly used in Little Fockers; 33 seconds of music from Cast Away was used in Bridesmaids; 35 seconds of music from Battle for the Planet of the Apes was used in Argo … and so forth.”
Is This 25-Year-Old Composer The Great Hope Of American Opera?
There are more established young composers who write operas, but if contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Aucoin has to be it — although his promise as a composer, conductor, pianist, poet and critic extends well beyond opera or any other single form. The conductor Johannes Debus says that the range of Aucoin’s talents exemplifies “Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for everything at once.”
Was The Minnesota Orchestra’s Trip To Cuba Really Good Diplomacy?
“The best answer seems to be that, yes, such events can be important. But there is a major caveat: They matter when both governments involved want them to matter. In this case, the evidence suggests that both Washington and Havana are interested in better relations. So this visit is likely to have a small place when the history of U.S.-Cuba rapprochement is written.”
Justice? Instagram Artist Appropriates Artist Who Appropriated Her Work And Undercuts His Price By 99.9%
“Selena Mooney, who founded the website SuicideGirls, which has sold online access to erotic images for more than a decade, wrote on Tuesday that she would sell nearly identical copies of one of the pictures chosen by Mr. Prince. She offered a steep discount, though. Her versions, five different inkjet prints on canvas at the same size as Mr. Prince’s, cost just $90. Proceeds will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, she said.”
Music Festivals Are Big Business These Days. Can A Festival Boost Spain’s Economy?
“In the midst of a country with a 23.7% unemployment rate, the growing festival is a notable bright spot in contemporary Spain. Even as the country’s young indignados demand major reforms, Primavera is proof that a well-run music festival can be an anchor for a recovering economy and a central element of its tourism.”
How Nostalgia Can Fuel Creativity
“Weirdly, nostalgia used to have a bad reputation—psychologists interpreted it as people avoiding the present, and it was even classified as a psychiatric disorder at one point. But recent research has shown that nostalgia can have positive effects, like making people more optimistic about the future and more willing to set new goals.”
New Book: Rex Harrison Was Not A Nice Man
“There he was, with all these endearments at the top of his voice. He treated us like dirt, we were nothing. We didn’t have anything to do with his film career.”
UK Court Orders ISPs To Block Access To Book Piracy Websites
“Our members need to be able to protect their authors’ works from such illegal activity. Writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material.”
Hitting + Things = Percussion
The world runs on rhythm. From the smallest heartbeat to the movement of the planets, rhythm powers and defines our lives. Modern percussion takes the rhythms of the world and makes them music. Learn how with master percussionist Steven Schick. This free four-class course will make you listen to music in a different way. Click to find out how.
How Doing Theatre For An Audience Of One Changes The Experience
“Acting is often spoken of as a narcissistic pursuit, but it seemed much more humble at Theatre for One. Why crave the attention of multitudes when the most we can ask for is to be seen—fully, if momentarily—by just one person? Being an audience of one started to feel less indulgent, too. When I stepped out of the booth, the line was twenty deep.”
Bartok – The 20th Century’s Loneliest Composer?
“Two careers, as composer and ethnomusicologist, would be more than enough for most, but Bartók managed a third, as travelling concert pianist. Finances were always tight, his relationships with women were complicated, and looming over it all were the tumultuous political upheavals of the first half of the 20th century.”
Rethinking The Museum Building So It Protects The Art From Natural Disaster
“Buildings now have to be designed like submarines. Do we have to completely rethink our infrastructure? Do we have to completely rethink everything?”
Havana Biennial Opens, But Cuba Arrests, Detains Artist For Doing Her Work
Tania Bruguera was once again detained by the authorities on Sunday afternoon after staging a performance at her Havana home, in which she and others read passages from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
How Hollywood Is Helping To Make Virtual Reality Interesting
“Shooting a movie or TV show is incredibly tough under the best of circumstances. [With VR], the basic things you learned from your experience no longer apply from a technical perspective, and there’s not a body of work you can point to saying, ‘We want it to be like that or like that.’”
Museum Visitor, Falling, Grabs Ancient Greek Urn, Smashing It
“A ministry statement says the prehistoric, Minoan-era vase, which had been broken in antiquity and restored after excavation, is being repaired and should be back on display on Friday.”
When Mark Zuckerberg Met Frank Gehry, This Is The Building That Resulted
“It is in fact an appealing throwback to the unfussy, ad hoc, quickly made experiments of Gehry’s early career. At the same time, there’s something plainly absurd about the idea that architecture could turn Facebook, whose market capitalization is now in the neighborhood of $225 billion, into a low-key outfit without airs, or even allow it to carry out a plausible impersonation of one.”
The Hardy Boys And Nancy Drew Industry – Keep Costs Down, Use Freelancers And Formularize Creativity
“The secret behind the longevity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is simple. They’re still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity. The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers—a business model that is central to the Internet age.”