“Men and women both write every possible kind of book—and yet, when you toss a book out into the marketplace, it will generally find more readers of one sort than the other. Publishers know this and market accordingly. And, if I’m honest, I did get some early indications of where on the spectrum my own book would fall. Over the years, I noticed who brightened up when I described what I was working on and whose eyes tended to glaze over.” – The American Scholar
Author: Douglas McLennan
Judge Rules Seller Of Fake Hals Must Pay Sotheby’s
As one of the judges said of this costly procedure, the law has “to fall on someone“, as “obviously it did not fall on the forger“. – The Art Newspaper
Yo Yo Ma Reflects On Life And Music
Music is not one thing. It’s something that people react to. But your question — “Is that good or bad?” — it depends on circumstances and individuals and timing. The invention of something starts out being more or less value-neutral. – The New York Times
Houston Grand Opera Managing Director To Depart; Company To Reorganize Leadership
Currently HGO is overseen by artistic and musical director Patrick Summers and Perryn Leech as managing director, with both reporting to the board of directors. The company’s new leadership structure will result in a new general director who will serve as a single point of leadership, to whom Summers will report as HGO’s artistic and musical director. – Opera News
Does Nudging Someone Really Change Behavior?
“Nudge theory has taken the world by storm (with organizations and governments using these techniques), and so you might be forgiven for thinking that these behavioural interventions get it right most of the time. Well, as is often the case, things do in fact go wrong in the world of nudging.” – 3QuarksDaily
Josh Kosman: My Encounters With Classical Music
“If you think of Classical Music as a vast and imposing monolith, with both words capitalized, it isn’t an easy thing to take on within a single encounter. Individual pieces, on the other hand, are like people — each one quirky and distinctive, and each one carrying the promise of a lifelong acquaintance.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Metal Monolith Discovered In The Utah Desert
Wildlife officials spotted the “unusual” object while counting sheep during a flyover in a remote south-eastern area of the US state. They said the structure had been planted in the ground between red rock. There was no indication who installed the monolith, which was about 10 to 12ft (3.6m) tall. – BBC
What Intellectual Thought In Silicon Valley Looks Like
In an erudite new book, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” Adrian Daub, a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford, investigates the concepts in which Silicon Valley is still staked. He argues that the economic upheavals that start there are “made plausible and made to seem inevitable” by these tightly codified marketing strategies he calls “ideals.” – The New York Times
The Met Museum @150: Peter Schjeldahl
“The Met is our Home Depot of the soul. It has just about whatever you want, and it has a lot of it, very largely the harvest of past donations, en masse, of the collections of major benefactors—a New York tradition that, per a bequest in 1969, entitled the banker Robert Lehman to require the construction of a whole new wing, devoted to his gifts. (That was annoying, but the art was worth it.)” – The New Yorker
“Toy Story” Is 25 Years Old
Toy Story might have been the first fully digital production, but its exhibition depended upon recording those digital images onto analogue film strips. This was a technology that had been in use, largely unchanged, since moving pictures first appeared a century earlier. – The Conversation