“For museum executives, the dirty secret of expansions has been that they are often motivated by the need to have some exciting new thing to rally board members and interest potential patrons. These institutions depend heavily on rich people to fund them. Those rich people like to pay for flashy new buildings; no one wants to donate to boring old museum upkeep.”
Month: July 2016
The Principal Dancer’s Career-Ending Injury That Created An Actress
“November 12, 2013. I was ready to make a jump, I hit a slippery spot on the floor and heard two huge pops in my right knee,” she says. “The ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) had ruptured. The pain came from my tibia slamming into my femur.” She’d had injuries before – what dancer hasn’t? – but realized this could be career-ending: “I went into surgery, knowing I might not come back.”
Study: Music Can Change Listeners’ Behavior
“Songs that deal with social topics seem to have an impact on our cognition and behavior,” the University of Wuerzburg’s Nicolas Ruth writes in the journal Psychology of Music. “Musicians espousing such messages would be pleased to know that their music has a real — if small — effect on people’s behavior.”
Looking For “Great” Composers Of Our Age? The Idea Of Greatness Might Not Work
“Fixed and hierarchical ideas of ‘greatness’ feel off-kilter with the times, even socially divisive in their narrow view of what greatness is and how it manifests itself not only musically, but also culturally and demographically.”
A Neuroscientist Wonders: Could We Upload Our Brains Into The Computer?
As a neuroscientist, my interest lies mainly in a more practical question: is it even technically possible to duplicate yourself in a computer program? The short answer is: probably, but not for a while.
Dance As A Fitness Routine? The Benefits Are Many
With “Just Dance,” I am elevating my heart rate, but I am also sidestepping the self. Depending on the song and background images, I am a partying hipster in a floor-length fur (Macklemore, “Can’t Hold Us”), or a futuristic funk dancer (Nicki Minaj, “Pound the Alarm”), or a girl with swinging blond hair at a club. Critics complain that the offerings on “Just Dance” skew painfully toward bubble-gum pop, but it also means that on “Just Dance,” I am forever young.
Seriously Cute: The Spread Of Kawaii Was, In Fact, A Japanese Government Plan
“The aggressive development of this aesthetic was not fully organic, but in fact developed with a ‘global wink,’ as part of Japan’s plan to build cultural cachet overseas. … The government has embraced the designation, eager to rebrand the world’s perception of a staid culture characterized by honor and samurai to a more playful, feminized Japan.”
Will Live-Streaming News Break The Cable News Networks?
“What we saw last week was live streaming’s Gulf War, a moment that will catapult the technology into the center of the news — and will begin to inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And that’s not a bad thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening up a much more compelling way to watch the news.”
Why Do People Think Using A Period In A Text Message Comes Across As Insincere Or Angry?
“Because text messaging is a conversation that involves a lot of back-and-forth, people add fillers as a way to mimic spoken language. We see this with the increased use of ellipses, which can invite the recipient to continue the conversation. The period is the opposite of that.”
Battles Rage Over Authenticating Modigliani Work
“As well as a number of suspected fakes on the market (more in drawings than in paintings, says Wayne), complicating the field has been an epic battle between two specialists, Christian Parisot and Marc Restellini, which aired publicly for more than a decade through the 2000s.”