“At the Virée classique, at just about the time an ordinary person starts to wonder when the concert will end, it ends. The audience disperses for lunch or some shopping or whatever, and then regroups in different combinations at another hall nearby for another shot of music.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Can You Really Create A Standardized Test To Grade For Creativity? (Some Schools Are Trying)
“This spring, with a six-district pilot, New Hampshire joined a small but growing list of at least a half-dozen states experimenting with large-scale arts testing. Educators prefer to call the new exams “assessments,” because they’re so different in form and format from traditional standardized tests. The goal, though, is to create a common “test”—often in the form of a project—that can be given to students in different classrooms across the state and used to help compare the performance of schools and districts.”
Edinburgh Festivals Say They Need To Be More International Post-Brexit
“Veteran arts impresario Richard Demarco warned that the Brexit vote was the biggest threat to the Edinburgh Festival in its history and was a betrayal of its roots. Mr Barley admitted Brexit would mean a “seismic shift” in the UK’s cultural landscape but insisted this need not mean ‘doom and gloom’ for Edinburgh’s festivals, which are facing the prospect of public funding cuts in the next few years.”
Has Los Angeles Become A Hotbed Of Contemporary Music?
“A grassroots new music community (or as ‘grassroots’ as anything which is tied to higher education can be) is in a true dialogue with the larger artistic culture, and the promise of the LA Philharmonic to make Los Angeles a contemporary musical destination seems to have finally taken root. An LA aesthetic has emerged, and I can’t help but notice a bit of pioneering Wild West in the raucous brew.”
Science In The Most Abstract REALLY Needs Philosophy
“This surprisingly blunt – and very public – talk from prestigious academics is what happens when scientists help themselves to, or conversely categorically reject, philosophical notions that they plainly have not given sufficient thought to.”
Frederick Law Olmsted Changed The Way We Think About Parks. But His Ideas Apply On A Much Bigger Scale
“Every square inch of land on Earth has been altered by our presence. Yet in the process we have failed to follow Olmsted’s conclusions to their logical end. If his theories about public greenswards could be applied to towns and cities, why shouldn’t they be applied to the planet as a whole?”
Poetry Versus The Machines
“Artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are about decreasing the length of human perception. Google autocomplete is an attempt to shorten the time and path between thought and a response — to decrease the time and path between seeing something and categorizing it or identifying it and moving on. To me what poetry in particular is so good at is defamiliarization. Increasing the length of perception.”
Breaking Shakespeare’s Grip On How Theatre Tells History
“That Shakespearean model, with its focus on kings and the high-born, is wedded, one might argue, to the Great Man theory of history. Commoners must fight for space on Shakespeare’s stage—and it’s not obvious whether the drunkards and prostitutes who populate the tavern where Prince Hal escapes the burdens of court, for instance, serve as rehearsals for responsive sovereignty, critics of royal ideology, or comic baggage to be shed on the way to the throne.”
Say Goodbye To “The Digital Divide” (It’s Gotten More Complex)
“Traditionally, the way the digital divide has been portrayed has definitely been a binary,” says Crystle Martin, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California–Irvine who specializes in studying digital literacy. “It’s been viewed, if you give people access to technology, they will be able to be online and able to access all the things available. But it actually doesn’t turn out to be true.”
How Choosing A Hobby Can Change Your Work
“Research conducted by Kevin Eschleman, an assistant psychology professor at San Francisco State University, suggests hobbies that are less relevant to one’s career are paradoxically more beneficial for it.”