“Just as the Fourth Geneva Convention has long protected civilians in times of war, we now need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace. And just as the Fourth Geneva Convention recognized that the protection of civilians required the active involvement of the Red Cross, protection against nation-state cyberattacks requires the active assistance of technology companies.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Exploring The Guggenheim Building As A Stage And Musical Instrument
“For this piece, the first that the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim has commissioned for the rotunda (as opposed to the museum’s theater), the interior architecture serves not just as a stage for movement but also as a musical instrument. Those sticks were tuned plastic tubes known as Boomwhackers. The performers were drumming a melody.”
Grammys Boss: We Don’t Have A Racism Problem
“I don’t think there’s a race problem at all. Remember, this is a peer-voted award. So when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity—it’s the 14,000 members of the Academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry. It’s always hard to create objectivity out of something that’s inherently subjective, which is what art and music is about. We do the best we can. We have 84 categories where we recognize all kinds of music, from across all spectrums. We don’t, as musicians, in my humble opinion, listen to music based on gender or race or ethnicity.”
When Fiction’s Not Enough (The Arundhati Roy Case For Something New)
Roy’s twenty-year turn to nonfiction makes a compelling case for the need for new forms of writing in conditions of social emergency, forms that remain resistant to commodification.
Ann Powers: Why (And How) The Grammys Are Racist
“Here’s the hard part when it comes to popular music. Pop is fun — it helps people relax and temporarily abandon their inhibitions, to express hidden parts of themselves and to open themselves up to others, including others fundamentally different from themselves. The music industry relies on the fantasy that pop is welcoming to all — to anyone who’s willing to buy a record (now a download or a streaming service subscription) or a concert ticket. Yet this is, in fact, a dream that’s often contradicted by reality.”
Why Sad Music Is So Compelling
There’s an inherent humanity in relating to each other when we’re at our weakest—it allows us to feel less alone, regardless of our circumstances. Music’s ability to tap into the human experience and both good and bad emotions is the universal connecting thread between songwriter and listener, according to Kenneth Aigen, music therapist, author and associate professor of music therapy at New York University.
Celebrate Good Design! (But Define What It Is First)
Thinking about the potential gap between design that’s good and design that succeeds raises the obvious question: What is “design,” anyway? This is a question that has been picked over for decades. Advocates of the profession—critics, curators, designers themselves—insist that the work is underestimated, if not flat-out marginalized. Design (they are forever pointing out) is not merely an exercise in superficial aesthetics or styling, as the public may assume. It is, rather, a far more serious matter of problem-solving and experience-shaping, driven by a uniquely rigorous approach to the human-made world in all its dimensions.
Fake News In Historical Context (We’ve Dealt With This Before)
“The production of fake, semi-false, and true but compromising snippets of news reached a peak in eighteenth-century London, when newspapers began to circulate among a broad public. In 1788, London had ten dailies, eight tri-weeklies, and nine weekly newspapers, and their stories usually consisted of only a paragraph. “Paragraph men” picked up gossip in coffee houses, scribbled a few sentences on a scrap of paper, and turned in the text to printer-publishers, who often set it in the next available space of a column of type on a composing stone. Some paragraph men received payment; some contented themselves with manipulating public opinion for or against a public figure, a play, or a book.”
German Museum Discovers It Has Owned A Rembrandt… For 250 Years
“Experts made comparisons, including microscopic analyses, with other Rembrandt originals in Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna to confirm that the chalk drawing indeed came from the world-renowned Dutch master’s hand. The museum noted how unusual the discovery was as worldwide only few drawings of animals by Rembrandt exist.”
Study: Any Sound In Your Work Environment Makes You Less Productive
“Distractions and interruptions are such a common part of our workdays, we don’t even think of them as excessive noise anymore. It’s often more obvious when we don’t hear the noise of distractions around us at work than when we do. A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that knowledge workers have focus periods of just 11 minutes on average in between interruptions.”