“If I understand [Richard] Florida, he’s arguing that today’s troubles are a consequence of the success of a few cities such as Seattle, and especially New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. And they are also victims because of affordability. As Florida correctly puts it, these cities have ‘wildly disproportionate shares’ of advanced industries, startups and talent. But what really caused this?”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Trumpet Virtuoso Who Reinvented Himself As A Teaching Virtuoso
Tim Wilson was a star trumpeter. But he began to go blind. Now – instead of playing Puccini’s “La Bohème” at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, the 58-year-old maestro is working up to 14 hours a day coaxing “Jingle Bells” out of beginners and pouring much of his life savings into bringing music back to a school where 95 percent of students live in poverty. If he can take kids who can’t play a note and teach them a song, Wilson believes, they will not just feel successful, but see new possibilities everywhere in their lives.
Art Appraisers Who Lowball Values To Cheat The IRS
The I.R.S. has long viewed the valuations given for artworks in income, estate and gift tax returns as a “potentially high abuse area,” as described in several recent reports. It sometimes uses a group of dealers, museum curators and scholars, known as the Art Advisory Panel of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, to advise the agency on works worth more than $50,000. According to annual reports by the panel, about 58 percent of the 1,840 works it reviewed from 2011 to 2015 were valued improperly.
Asking Kids The Big Questions – How They Philosophize
“From ages eight to eleven, kids are natural philosophers—before puberty and those awful inhibitions creep in. All you have to do is trigger the question and let it roll.”
Ludovic Morlot To Leave Seattle Symphony
“We were very aggressive about being relevant for the community we were in,” Morlot said. “We want people to feel that this symphony is their community orchestra.” But that part of his job, he said, “is crucial but sometimes exhausting” — the fundraising, the meetings, the oversight for educational programs and civic engagement.
Architecture As A Matter Of Conscience
Architectural commissions that once might have seemed benign look more and more like matters of conscience. We know, for instance, that greenfield development destroys wildlife habitats even as species extinctions are occurring at a catastrophic rate. We know that projects in the United Arab Emirates are being built with slave labor. We know that luxury housing in New York and other cities has become a vehicle for international money laundering.
Canada Has Produced Numerous Global Stars. Alas, It’s Unsustainable
“The paradox in Canadian music is that we have so many superstars and very few developmental channels to build future superstars. We cannot expect to continue to have globally relevant Canadian pop stars without examining (or creating) the mechanisms needed to sustain pop chart ascension.”
Vancouver Opera Is Trying To Be A Festival. But First The Company’s Director Has To Get Off Crutches
VO moved to a festival model to ensure the future viability of the company as it deals with universal challenges facing the opera world. Kim Gaynor says tickets are selling, but she concedes the buzz has been slow to build.
The Art Market Is Brutal – For Gender Equity
From 2011 to 2016, just two in 100 of the top lots sold by living artists at auction were works by women. Of 2,300 artworks in the National Gallery, only 20 are by women, and none of the top ten richest living artists in the world are women.
Looks Like Hackers Might Be Able To Break Our Strongest Encryptions. So now Quantum Cryptography. But…
“Cryptographers think that a new kind of computer based on quantum physics could make public-key cryptography insecure. Bits in a normal computer are either 0 or 1. Quantum physics allows bits to be in a superposition of 0 and 1, in the same way that Schrödinger’s cat can be in a superposition of alive and dead states. This sometimes lets quantum computers explore possibilities more quickly than normal computers. While no one has yet built a quantum computer capable of solving problems of nontrivial size (unless they kept it secret), over the past 20 years, researchers have started figuring out how to write programs for such computers and predict that, once built, quantum computers will quickly solve ‘hidden subgroup problems’. Since all public-key systems currently rely on variations of these problems, they could, in theory, be broken by a quantum computer.”