Not understanding makes bad things happen. When we don’t understand why lightning strikes or ships sink or babies die, sacrificing virgins might seem a viable approach. - Wired
Behind the bright lights and pulsing music, some dancers say they were sexually assaulted, harassed and manipulated by the company’s powerful founder and famous teachers and choreographers, according to a joint investigation by The Associated Press and the Toronto Star. - Seattle Times (AP)
The donations, the largest in each organization's history, come from the estate of H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest, the board chair who oversaw the Museum's creation and opening and the owner of The Inquirer before he transferred it to the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism in 2016. - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
Few places now seem to epitomise Russia’s cultural decoupling from the west better than the large, empty walls of GES-2, created as Moscow’s answer to Tate Modern. - The Guardian
Lucas Mann, an English professor at a UMass branch campus: "For a professor at a school like mine, ... the trick isn't convincing students to drop their dogmas. It's convincing them that the stuff we're talking about could matter in lives already complicated by many other things." - Slate
Research has found that we actually harbor an aversion to creators and creativity; subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive, and as a recent study demonstrated, this bias can potentially discourage us from undertaking an innovative project or hiring a creative employee. - The New York Times
Here's the deal: "Being very different from the mainstream is really, really bad for your likelihood of initially making a hit when you’re not well known. But once you have a hit, novelty suddenly becomes a huge asset that is likely to sustain your success." - The Atlantic
May 2022 sees the latest technological advances in musical immortality when Abba return to the live stage after a 40-year absence. But this time they return as humanoids – the digital hologram “twins” of the original global phenomenon. - The Conversation
"Far from being sweet and adorable, rabbits in the margins and illuminated letters of these texts ... are frequently shown wielding swords, axes, and bows and arrows as they fight against — and sometimes kill — those who often hunted them." - Mental Floss
This week, the Russian dissident leader's Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project released an extensive report on the conductor's wealth and its sources. Here's an English-language summary of the findings — including, the report alleges, "large-scale fraudulent misappropriation of charitable funds." - Van
In the past, even when political tensions between nations grew ugly, artistic endeavors rose above the din. But Putin’s murderous actions are the playbook of Hitler, not the Cold War. He has now made it impossible for the Met to work with his artistic cronies or those cultural entities he subsidizes. - Playbill
At first blush, it might seem obvious. But history is full of failed, unfinished or underperforming scratch-built city projects, in California and elsewhere, and more are in the pipeline. - Bloomberg
Several well-controlled studies showing that academic training in preschool or in kindergarten, while improving test scores in the short term, causes long-term harm. - Psychology Today
Police in other cities have been recorded playing copyrighted music in an effort to prevent videos of them from hitting YouTube and other social media sites, which can remove content containing unauthorized materials. - Washington Post
"Obscenity might seem a trivial side note in such a horrific conflict, but understanding it is a way of understanding language, and language has played a big part both in Moscow's professed motivations for this invasion and in Kyiv's defiant response." - The Guardian
"Santoya Fields said it wasn't an illness that led to her being unable to take the stage; it was the impact of what she described as an unsafe workplace and a lack of organizational support." - The Washington Post
History writing is based on the faith that events, despite appearances, don’t happen higgledy-piggledy—that although individuals can act irrationally, change can be explained rationally. - The New Yorker
It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. - The Atlantic
Can you really reach a larger audience by getting on a background jazz playlist than taking home the most coveted Grammy? I hate to share the bad news, my friends, but the world has changed. - Ted Gioia
