“Next season, Best Sound Design of a Musical and Best Sound Design of a Play will be reinstated to the list of competitive Tony Award categories with a new voting process. In addition, it was determined that for similar reasons, the category of Best Orchestrations will adhere to this same new voting process. The Tony Nominators will nominate for these categories as in the past. However, voting on the winners of the three categories will now be the responsibility of a subset of the overall voter pool based on their professional affiliation.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The New Generation Of “Reality” TV Shows Is Fascinating (If You Want To Understand America)
“Niche reality shows reveal a range of American cultures and give the audience a new experience: the chance to plunge into others’ unfamiliar realities. Dividing “reality” into ever more microscopic fields, the joyously weird new contest shows celebrate the deviations from the normal, amplifying a subculture’s arcana to stadium size. A cynic might cavil that networks are merely exploiting the American viewer’s new taste, trained by social media, for variety and distinctiveness.”
Nostalgia Is Huge Business Right Now. Here’s Why
“The feeling that every advertiser wants to evoke in millennials is nostalgia; that warm, comforting sensation that one experiences when recollecting the past. People usually feel nostalgic for their own past, commonly referred to as autobiographical nostalgia. But oddly enough, they can also feel nostalgia for time periods when they weren’t alive; perhaps their parents played old music to them when they were young, and now, they associate those sensory details with positive memories.”
Uh-Oh – Has Science Gotten Too Complex For Humans To Comprehend?
“The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered. Also, human creativity seems to depend increasingly on the stochasticity of previous experiences – particular life events that allow a researcher to notice something others do not. Although chance has always been a factor in scientific discovery, it is currently playing a much larger role than it should.”
Why It’s Essential That Computer Scientists Study The Humanities
“Universities should start with broader training for computer science students. I contacted eight of the top undergraduate programs in computer science, and found that most do not require students to take a course on ethical and social issues in computer science (although some offer optional courses). Such courses are hard to teach well. Computer scientists often don’t take them seriously, are uncomfortable with non-quantitative thinking, are overconfident because they’re mathematically brilliant, or are convinced that utilitarianism is the answer to everything. But universities need to try.”
Bang On A Can – Still Banging Away 30 Years Later
Unplugged, soft-spoken and unchaotic — parents now, rather than children — is a good summary of the Bang on a Can founders these days, even as their energy is undimmed. Their work, once punkishly outsiderish, is now showered with mainstream accolades.
Richard Florida: The Rise Of Creative Inequality
The clustering of talent and economic assets in cities is benefiting “the already privileged, leaving 66 percent of the population behind,” Florida says. “Left unchecked, this clustering force generates a lopsided, extremely unequal kind of urbanism in which a relative handful of superstar cities, and a few elite neighborhoods within them, benefit while many other places stagnate or fall behind.”
Is Classical Music Still Relevant? Sorry – But That’s The Wrong Question
“The only possibility for orchestras and opera houses to find new repertoire, with the chance that they hit upon something of real value, is to preserve a practical framework: the one which defines the fundamentals of the art form. This means ignoring the postwar modernist ideologies of progress – because there is no progress in the arts – and requiring of new repertoire that it be suited to the medium as it has developed over time.”
I.M. Pei At 100
“Over the course of his career, the aristocrat of American architects, who turns 100 on April 26, has drawn on a dazzling range of influences, from Chinese gardens to ancient Colorado cliff dwellings to the fountain in a Cairo mosque. He blended the austere modernism of the Bauhaus with opulent Beaux-Arts classicism, technological daredevilry with reverence for precedent and a minute study of the past.”
Contemporary Criticism Is Having An Identity Crisis
The primary concern of contemporary criticism is not whether a given cultural object is good or bad, but how that object reflects the realities of the social world, and how it can potentially (re)shape that same world. For Weinmann, “this new turn of criticism, this emphasis on the politics behind art, may be better for a work’s reputation than criticism that ignores politics.”