Today digital technology is all the rage because after decades of development it has become incredibly useful. Still, if you look closely, you can already see the contours of its inevitable descent into the mundane. We need to start preparing for a new era of innovation in which different technologies, such as genomics, materials science, and robotics, rise to the fore.
Month: July 2018
Teaching Girls To Code By Teaching Them Dance
“STEM From Dance [is] a New York City-based nonprofit founded by Yamilee Toussaint — an MIT grad who’s been dancing since age 5. The program targets middle and high school girls of color, who are vastly underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, and might not otherwise see STEM as an option or be encouraged to try it.”
Supreme Court’s Interstate Sales Tax Ruling Will Impact Galleries And Art Sales
“The Wayfair decision looks like a sales tax game-changer for many New York galleries,” attorney and art law expert Thomas C. Danziger told artnet News. “Until now, most New York dealers who delivered works of art to out-of-state buyers didn’t even have to think about sales tax, much less go through the exercise of computing and collecting tax from the buyer based on the delivery location.“
New York City’s Been The Capital Of Tap Dancing For Two Centuries
“In the 1800s, tap appeared along the East River at Catherine Market, where slaves from Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island would congregate. ‘They were coming in to sell herbs and roots on their days off — they were allowed by their masters to do that — and they also had their dancing skills to sell. … They’d put down pieces of wood they called shingles and do a jig and a breakdown for money.'”
Wattpad Has Built A Thriving Fiction Community. Now It’s Become A Go-To For Hollywood
It’s a nurturing, highly interactive community where its core 13- to 35-year-old readership spends around 20 billion combined minutes per month consuming and critiquing user-generated stories, in genres such as sci-fi, young-adult fiction, poetry, and horror, but also fanciful fanfic with titles like 50 Shades of Drake and Harry Styles Dirty Imagines. For Hollywood development executives, however, Wattpad has come to serve an altogether different purpose. Since launching its dedicated entertainment division Wattpad Studios two years ago, the self-publishing platform has evolved into a one-stop shop for fresh IP: an influential incubator for original storytelling with a decidedly Gen Y bent.
‘Football’s Coming Home’ – Unpacking England’s World Cup Anthem
Rebecca Mead has a go at the 1996 song whose official title is “Three Lions”: “It has been suggested that the song is about the heartbreaking condition of being a fan, which, in soccer-centric terms at least, it is. But it is also a song about English defeat — or, to put it more precisely, English defeatedness. … It’s a song about decline and regret and loss, about the tempting allure of resignation — the English emotional default — and the terrible pain of hopefulness.”
We Increasingly Depend On Bayesian Probability Logic. So Why Was It Dismissed For So Long?
For most of the two and a half centuries since the Reverend Thomas Bayes first made his pioneering contributions to probability theory, his ideas were side-lined. The high priests of statistical thinking condemned them as dangerously subjective and Bayesian theorists were regarded as little better than cranks. It is only over the past couple of decades that the tide has turned.
Habsburg Culture Is Becoming Cool Again
“‘Every few weeks I do a search on Twitter and there is an incredible benevolence about the Habsburgs,’ says Eduard Habsburg, Hungary’s ambassador to the Vatican and the former ruling family’s unofficial social-media maven. ‘There is definitely renewed interest.’ The reasons for this burst of enthusiasm are nuanced, even contradictory. This year’s centennial of the end of the first world war, and of the empire’s collapse, is part of the explanation. So is a sense that the anxieties of the late imperial period, years of disorienting change in politics and society, overlap with today’s.”
How To Make Sense Of Coincidences?
Today, nearly all scientists say that coincidences are just that: coincidences – void of greater meaning. Yet, they’re something we all experience, and with a frequency that is uniform across age, sex, country, job, even education level. Those who believe that they’ve had a ‘meaningful coincidence’ in their lives experience a collision of events so remarkable and unlikely that they chose to ascribe a form of grander meaning to the occurrence, via fate or divinity or existential importance.
What Happens When Your Country Is Run By An Aging Narcissist Who May Not Be Entirely Stable? ‘King Lear’
“In the third episode of Lend Me Your Ears, host Isaac Butler talks to theater critic Helen Shaw, Yale English professor David Kastan, and University of Roehampton professor Clare McManus about the themes of unification, misogyny, and entitlement found in one of Shakespeare’s greatest works.” (podcast)