Plath’s whole family figured she’d return to the U.S. after her marriage to Ted Hughes fell apart. She didn’t. Her reasons were several: not disrupting her children’s lives, getting child support out of Hughes, the work she was getting in London. Above them all: the experiences (and expense) she had had with the American medical system versus Britain’s National Health Service.
How Samizdat Recordings Were Smuggled Around During Soviet Days
“The music flowing out of the record player sounds distant, muffled, surrounded by whispers. The singer’s voice alternates moments of clarity with crackly sputters– as if coming out of a wormhole from a windy day in the Fifties. You can get the sense that what is being played is no ordinary vintage record: indeed, on the platter, instead of a vinyl, is the X-Ray of some guy’s skull, cut in the shape of a disc.”
What Will Happen To Soundcloud’s Musician Cultures If The Service Dies?
“Since its start in 2008, SoundCloud has been a digital space for diverse music cultures to flourish, far beyond the influence of mainstream label trends. For lesser-known artists, it has been a place where you can attract the attention of fans and the record industry without having to work the usual channels. There is now a huge roster of successful artists who first emerged on SoundCloud, including the R.&B. singer Kehlani, the electronic musician Ta-Ha, the pop musician Dylan Brady and the rapper Lil Yachty, to name just a few.”
NBC News Profiles Rising Young African-American Conductor Roderick Cox
When he was a young man in Macon, Georgia, “it was clear he had a good ear and the passion, but for a while, the furthest point he imagined going in his musical career was becoming a band director. And then his worldview opened up” – thanks to Victor Yampolsky at Northwestern University. “Now two years into his role as associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, he’s come a long way from leading a convocation of action figures.”
Employers Say They Want More Creativity. But Integrating It Into The Office Is Difficult
“According to a 2008 survey, 85% percent of employers looking to hire creative employees reported were “difficulty finding qualified applicants.” Yet the same survey found 57% of respondents citing arts degrees as being reflective of creativity. More recent research from IBM found that CEOs think creativity will be the most valuable skill around the office. But that begs the question: if there is a purported interest on the part of companies, why aren’t there more arts majors actually working in offices?”
Fears That ’13 Reasons Why’ Could Lead To Spike In Teen Suicide May Have Been Well-Founded: Study
“Google queries about suicide rose by almost 20 percent in 19 days after the show came out, representing between 900,000 and 1.5 million more searches than usual regarding the subject.’ And yes, there is typically a correlation between searches and attempts; also, “searches for precise suicide methods increased after the series’ release.”
Watching Will Shortz, New York Times Crossword Editor And NPR Puzzlemaster, At Work
A reporter visits Shortz’s home office in the NYC suburbs and watches him collaborate with the Times digital puzzle editor, a former Shortz intern.
What I Learned At The National Critics Institute
“Workshopping 14 reviews of the same show is enlightening and frustrating. We learn so much from each other. Different lenses, different voices, different strengths. There’s a critic who talks about music in ways that make us all jealous. We recognize each other’s paragraphs and fonts instinctually by now. As my admiration for the others grows, my self-confidence breaks apart. Every point my fellow critics makes is just another point I missed. I don’t know if I’m getting better at this.”
What Defines Hip In Classical Music
“Classical hipsters don’t try to be hip. They just are. Attempted hipsterism is often geared towards reaching the younger audience member. There have been some notable successes, but not in the numbers we hoped to achieve. Audiences young and “old” recognize a strong, committed performance of the music we create on stage. Let’s always start there.”
Why Arts High Schools Are Phenomenally Successful With Students
“Performing and visual arts high schools like New World inspire a fierce devotion among students and graduates. It is no wonder. Many serve as springboards to the professional world. Just as important, graduation and college attendance rates are typically high (100 and 96 percent for New World), particularly impressive considering the schools’ urban setting. The best of these schools offer a conservatory-style training ground that helps budding artists win admission to an undergraduate arts program — training that is expensive, requiring a cadre of specialized teachers and money for student performances.”
Why Is The U.S. So Bad At Teaching Students Foreign Languages?
“As an expert on language and literacy development in children, I’ve talked to many immigrant parents who expect their children to grow up bilingual, only to be surprised that they end up as monolingual English speakers. Meanwhile, foreign language learning opportunities for English speakers are limited. Why is the U.S. so bad at producing bilinguals?” Harvard education professor Catherine Snow suggests three reasons, and argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.
William Gibson (Who Would Know) Talks About Our Current Cultural Obsession With Dystopias
“This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase ‘the 22nd century.'”
Why I Want To Build An Art Museum For Las Vegas
Condo developer Uri Vaknin: “Already a world-renowned dining, entertainment and shopping capital, our city is now becoming a cultural hub. The openings of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, The Mob Museum and the Neon Museum signals a clear move in that direction. Yet, I remain dumbfounded that Las Vegas lacks a world-class art museum.”
Patti Smith Remembers Her Buddy, Sam Shepard, And How She Helped Him Finish His Last Manuscript
“Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take you there.’ I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors – saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.”
Dirty Dancing: Choreographer Trajal Harrell Shakes Things (Ahem) Up
“The voguing balls of Harlem, the hoochie koochie dances of rural America, the elaborate, prancing gait of runway models – these aren’t influences that routinely feature in contemporary dance. Yet for the American choreographer Trajal Harrell they’ve proved extraordinarily fertile. … His pieces might feature a man posing semi-naked in a pair of Hermès scarves, a woman encased in a small black cube meticulously removing her swimsuit, or a man in a gaudy oriental skirt, gravely shaking his booty.”
Seattle Voters Reject Sales Tax For Arts
“Proposition 1, which requested a 0.1 percent sales tax – or a penny for every $10 spent – was being rejected by 55 percent of [King County] voters, with 45 percent approving.”
Channeling A Gay Black Avant-Garde (And Crazy) Composer In, Of All Places, The United Arab Emirates
Seph Rodney sees a music-and-video project about the late Julius Eastman at the Sharjah Biennial.
Criticism At A Remove – But Why Does Criticism Have To Stand Apart?
Rita Felski asks what might happen if we looked not “behind the text” but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” In doing so, she seeks to rehabilitate the validity and importance of what we might call “literary desire”: the force that drives you to reread your favorite book yet again; or to finish that work of genre fiction even when you know the ending; or to press a beloved book awkwardly into a distant acquaintance’s hands in hopes that she, too, will come to love what you love and might one day talk with you about it.
How Design Permeates Our Culture (and Vice Versa)
“We’re all ’80s kids,” said David Dodde, co-owner and designer at House Industries. “We’re not inventing anything, we’re just stealing really well. It’s all about the honesty of the theft. In a way, we’re paying homage.”
Understanding The Arcane Process By Which The MPAA Rates Movies (By Someone Who Used To Do It)
What makes, for example, a woman kissing a man OK for G-viewers, while a man kissing another man is PG or PG-13 worthy? Howard Fridkin rated movies on the MPAA’s rating board for over a decade.
How Jack Benny And Harry Conn Figured Out The Formula For Situation Comedy
“In vaudeville you had one show and that was it. You changed it whenever you felt like it,” Benny said, years later. But, in radio, “when you realized that every week you needed a new show, this got a little bit frightening.” In another interview, he recalled, “The first show was a cinch—I used about half of all the gags I knew. The second show consumed all the rest, and I faced the third absolutely dry.”
So Facebook’s AI Bots Created Their Own Language. Is That Creepy? Maybe Not…
“In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand – but while it might look creepy, that’s all it was.”
The Instagram Dancer Who Stands Out
While Instagram has become a go-to forum for dancers recording themselves in class and rehearsal, Marlee Grace has managed to stand out, though it’s hard to pinpoint why. Maybe it’s her musical selections, which range from Justin Bieber to wind and waves; her playful, impulsive choices as a mover and iPhone videographer; or the sense that she’s not working toward anything in particular, just dancing for herself and anyone who happens to cross her virtual path.
Why Do Dystopian Science Fiction Cities Look So Much Like The Cities We Already Have?
Justin Davidson: “Most of us can imagine only what we already know, and even the fantasies of visionary filmmakers can be astonishingly earthbound. The inventors of nonexistent cities don’t have to worry about building codes, zoning, financing regulations, or even the need to make their structures stand up. Rather than use that freedom to unleash radical design or dream up darkly beautiful architecture, they simply recycle the present and make it bigger, and worse.”
Getty’s Multicultural Internship Program Has Had A Profound Impact On LA’s Arts Leadership
“The idea: Provide students with real-world professional experience at cultural nonprofits small and large, be it the Center for the Study of Political Graphics or the Museum of Contemporary Art. The first crop of 89 interns completed sessions at 80 arts organizations around Los Angeles in summer 1993. Twenty-five years later, the Multicultural Internship Program is still going strong. Over that period, the Getty Foundation has funded more than 3,200 internships at an estimated 160 Los Angeles arts organizations — including 120 internships this summer. That amounts to an investment of more than $12 million over a quarter century.”