“Singing in a room for an extended period of time, in close contact with lots of people and no ventilation — that’s a recipe for disaster,” says Shelly Miller, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Along with Jelena Srebric at the University of Maryland, Miller is leading a six-month research project looking at singers’ and other musicians’ transmission of aerosol particles. – NPR
Life In The Fast Lane? It Comes With A Cost
“There’s a cost to living; there’s a cost to doing everything. That cost depends on the speed at which we’re living, to some degree. If we are living our lives at a very fast rate, we tend to wear out sooner. There is a strong relationship between metabolic rate—the rate at which we’re taking in oxygen and burning up food—and lifespan. Under good conditions, we focus most of our resources on sexual maturation. I’m speaking not so much about humans as animals in general. But this goes beyond the animal kingdom.” – Nautilus
Report: Racism At Canadian Museum Of Human Rights
“I served as an external adviser and peer reviewer for the museum over several years. The current crisis may be shocking, but it’s a predictable consequence of the museum’s history of separating strategic management practices from human rights principles.” – The Conversation
How Swedish Culture Explains Its Response To COVID
It also helps explain the Swedish policy response to Covid-19 — banning gatherings over 50, encouraging home working and social distancing, shielding of vulnerable groups, while keeping society as open as possible — which can be seen as typically lagom. It was designed to be proportionate to the threat, but unhysterical, and sustainable over the long term. To rip up a long-prepared pandemic plan and impose unprecedented measures just because everybody else was would be considered reckless; to close schools would have been considered morally unacceptable. – Unherd
This Old Middle Eastern Verse Form Is Alive And Vigorous To This Day, Even In English
The ghazal “is an intimate and relatively short lyric form of verse from the Middle East and South Asia. The form thrives in such languages as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and now English.” Claire Chambers provides a brief guide to how the form works and what has made it great poetry in the past and today. – 3 Quarks Daily
How Do You Work To Preserve Indigenous Languages When You And Your Native Speakers Are All In Lockdown?
“It’s a transition that has taken on particular urgency given the fact that the speaker pool for the world’s threatened and endangered languages skews older — precisely the population most at risk from the pandemic. This problem is compounded by the fact that indigenous communities not just in the United States but around the world are disproportionately affected both by the virus and by the economic toll of the shutdown. Against this backdrop, the push to keep language revitalization going under lockdown is a symbol of cultural resilience — and, for many, an opportunity to build national and international solidarity among indigenous peoples around the world.” – Slate
Disney Drops 20th Century Fox Brand Entirely
“Shedding the Fox name entirely from 20th Century Fox Television in the wake of the Disney-Fox merger, that studio will now be known as 20th Television. … Nixing ‘Fox’ from 20th TV was part of the negotiated merger terms between Disney and 21st Century Fox in order to prevent confusion among consumers. On the film side, 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight removed ‘Fox’ from their names in January.” – Variety
Judit Reigl, Painter Who Abandoned Breton And Surrealism For Abstraction And The Human Body, Dead At 97
It was only a short time after Breton gave her her first solo show in Paris that she left the artistic movement he spearheaded, developing a muscular, energetic approach to abstract art. Roughly a decade later, she began applying that approach to partially abstracted (and muscular) human figures. – ARTnews
Martha Graham’s ‘Lamentation’ Is Just The Piece We Need In The Time Of COVID
Dana Naomy Mills: “The theme of the universality of grief, as well as the tension of confinement and expansion that echo throughout Graham’s performance, acquire a double meaning by being viewed at this time, when contemporary spectators, shielding from the virus, are isolated inside their own grief.” – Psyche
In Denver: Without Live Music, Who Are We?
More than halfway through Denver’s bizarre, unprecedented Summer of No Music, an increasing amount of people — artists and fans alike — are wondering: Without live music, who are we? – Denver Post
British Authors Raised £1 Million To Help Fellow Writers Through The Pandemic. That Money’s Almost Gone.
“Almost £1m has been given out to nearly 700 authors since the end of March, to help those facing financial crisis through the coronavirus pandemic. But the Society of Authors has warned that funds are now running low, and that losses for writers are set to continue into next year.” – The Guardian
A Brief History Of Music Shaped By Technology
Music has been around as long as there have been people. Longer if you count music made by animals. It’s safe to say that music will be a part of this world as long as there is life. So what happens when new technology encounters an eternal constant for humans? – 3 Quarks Daily
Those Ubiquitous Ads For MasterClass? Here’s What You Actually Get
MasterClass launched in 2015 with just three classes: Dustin Hoffman on acting, Serena Williams on tennis, and Patterson on writing. Since then the company has grown exponentially, raising $135 million in venture capital from 2012 to 2018. It now has more than 85 classes across nine categories. (Last year it added 25 new classes, and this year it intends to add even more.) After the pandemic hit, as people started spending more time at home, its subscriptions surged, some weeks increasing tenfold over the average in 2019. – The Atlantic
Why Is Everyone Beating Up On TikTok?
TikTok, the video making and sharing app probably most known for its quirky video memes and gags made by people under 20, seems to be in many governments’ crosshairs. The attacks either come directly on the platform itself or to people using it in ways that violate the local social order. – Hyperallergic
Salome Bey, 86, Canada’s “First Lady Of The Blues”
After making their first appearance in Toronto in 1961, Salome settled there in 1964 and began playing the jazz club circuit, soon earning the sobriquet that would be with her the rest of her life: “Canada’s First Lady of the Blues.” – CBC
Extras Being Replaced By Mannequins?
Showrunners have been changing scenes to have little or no background performers, Paula Spurr says. She’s even heard of some smaller-budget productions using mannequins “in the deep background” these days. “It’s like, ‘Oh great, we’re being replaced with dummies,”‘ Spurr says with a laugh. – CBC
A Reappraisal Of Stanley Kubrick
David Mikics’s “Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker” is a cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. This is not a full-dress biography — there have been several of Kubrick — but a brisk study of his films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite. – The New York Times
Broadway Star Danny Burstein On Struggling With COVID
“The other day, my pal, the brilliant songwriter Tom Kitt, called me. He said he was frustrated by his lack of creativity because of the pandemic and was reaching out to several friends to see if we could write songs together. He said, “Is there something going on in your life at the moment that you just have to express?” And I sat at my computer and wrote the following: “The question we keep asking is how do you have hope when every moment is a struggle? When every second is a reminder.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Reconsidering Poulenc
He was no originator, like Schoenberg or Stravinsky, nor did he possess Britten’s or Shostakovich’s command of manifold genres. He was, however, a composer of rare gifts, particularly in the setting of sacred and secular texts. As the decades pass, he grows in stature, and his aloofness from musical party politics matters less. – The New Yorker
UK Report: Theatres With Proper Ventilation Could Be Safe To Reopen At Full Capacity
Ventilation is more effective at protecting against airborne transmission of the Covid-19 virus than social distancing or PPE – and “many performance venues have the capability to provide good levels of ventilation,” according to Government advisers. – Arts Professional
Philadelphia Museum Of Art To Reopen At Half Speed
Attendance is expected to be between 1,500 and 1,700 visitors per day, or about half of what’s normal, said Jessica Sharpe, the museum’s chief of membership and visitor operations. – Philadelphia Inquirer
How The Aztecs Recorded History
The Aztec historians, creators of a genre called the xiuhpohualli (SHOO-po-WA-lee), developed a highly effective way of keeping satisfying memories alive. The pictographic texts that Itzcoatl burned were only a part of the Aztec way of keeping history. The glyphs served as mnemonic devices designed to elicit volumes of speech. – Psyche