Author: Douglas McLennan

Interest In Disaster, Dystopian Stories Is Soaring. Why?

Global downloads for Plague Inc, a 2012 video game that encourages players to spread a disease around the world before a cure is found, increased by an annual 123% from January to March this year, as the spread of Covid-19 began to gather speed internationally. Its UK-based developer Ndemic Creation addressed the game’s popularity: “Whenever there is an outbreak of disease, we see an increase in players as people seek to find out more about how diseases spread, and to understand the complexities of viral outbreaks,” the company said. – BBC

Book Sales Were Down 35 Percent In April

Categories of books that sold best last month were fiction, cookbooks, and children’s books, but compared with April 2019, sales were largely down at the indies contacted. Most saw declines of more than 35% compared to the same period in the prior year. For many, online sales continue to be a lifeline, especially direct-to-home orders fulfilled by Ingram. – Publishers Weekly

The Medieval Book That Suggested How The World Looked

Asking a Medieval person to imagine the world and their place on it would demand a radically different sort of cognitive map than one a modern person might rely on. This affects pragmatic matters (of navigation and so forth), but also what could be termed poetic ones as well. Philosopher Bertrand Westphal writes in Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces that the “perception of space and the representation of space do not involve the same things,” and this is a crucial point. – Nautilus

Time For Spotify Et Al To Pay Musicians More

Spotify, which controls 36 per cent of the world streaming market, reported third-quarter operating proceeds of $60 million (all figures U.S.) in October 2019. YouTube, meanwhile, revealed its ad-revenue intake publicly for the first time in February: last year it was $15.15 billion, a 36 per cent increase from 2018’s $11.16-billion tally. And here’s what you’ve been offering the creators in return for all that content that has enabled you to attract and retain tens of millions of loyal subscribers — paltry per-stream or pre-view royalty rates of, by platform: YouTube, $0.00069; Pandora, $0.00133; Vevo, $0.00222-$0.0025; Amazon, $0.00402; Spotify, $0.00437; Deezer, $0.0064; Google Play, $0.00676; Apple Music, $0.00783; Napster, $0.019 and Tidal, $0.01284 (all figures according to the online music distributor Ditto). – Toronto Star

Education Moved Online With Startling Speed – But It Will Be Bumpy From Here…

In non-pandemic times, even the most modest change at a college or university can take months, if not years. Think of the committees, reports, reviews, and approvals needed to introduce even a timid curriculum revision. That millions of faculty moved hundreds of thousands of courses online in a matter of weeks reveals the surprising resilience of academia in crisis. But with colleges and universities still shuttered and no clear indication of when they might reopen, don’t expect smooth sailing from now on. – Spectrum IEEE

Could The Pandemic Be The Catalyst To Change How Museums Work?

A sense of precariousness is not unfamiliar to museum workers who were already living through austerity, Brexit, and the deregulation of the workforce. But long before this current health crisis, the skepticism about whether commercially-driven blockbuster exhibitions could ever plug the widening gaps in public funding for museums was already part of a much bigger existential question: Is the dominant model for 21st-century museums sustainable? – Artnet

How The Chicago Symphony Is Thinking About Returning To The Stage

“If things are not yet 100 percent (in Chicago in September), it’s possible we could have a group of the orchestra divided into two parts: a group of 45, 50 people (and) another group of 45, 50 people. One part plays in the first part of the program, the other in the second part, so everybody can play, can come back to make music.” – Chicago Tribune