With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance. – CNN
Author: Douglas McLennan
Alan Gilbert Appointed Director Of The Royal Swedish Opera
He will begin in the spring of 2021. Gilbert will combine his new position with the post of Chief Conductor at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the position which he took in the fall of 2019. – Operawire
Study: It Takes Decades (4), But Liberal Arts College Degree Pays Off
40 years after enrollment, the return at liberal arts colleges reached $918,000, more than 25 percent higher than the $723,000 median gain at all colleges. – InsideHigherEd
Hollywood Talent Agencies Face Uncertain Times
Agencies are under growing pressure “to scale up and adapt to a changing media industry. The rise of streaming and the expected decline of TV packaging — where agencies collect fees for packaging talent on shows — combined with the effects of the longstanding writers boycott, have squeezed talent agencies, some of which have weathered high-level executive turnover, laid off workers and cut back on overtime pay for assistants.” – Los Angeles Times
How To Save The Oscars From The Academy
At the moment, the Oscars reflect the Academy, but the Academy reflects nothing but its august name; plausible deniability and the shunning of responsibility are built into the current system. Paradoxically, counting only votes from members with a stake in the image of the industry put forth by the industry would cast onto the Oscars the sharp light of accountability, would be, in effect, a truth-in-awards program.” – The New Yorker
The Very Complicated Culture Of Reviewing Books
The consequence of identifying so closely with the literary community is that critics often don’t feel that they’re part of the reviewing apparatus. They feel like they’re subject to it. This has two consequences. First, they live in a certain fear of it, because the kind of reception that their future books will have might be contingent on their relationship with the person they are reviewing. Second, there’s a lot of insistence that the book reviewing world is going through some challenges, but there’s very little consensus about who is responsible for making changes. – American Scholar
Idea Factory: What Makes Malcolm Gladwell Tick
“When I suggest to Gladwell he has an unusually relaxed attitude towards criticism, he returns to a theme from the night before: success is wasted on the successful. ‘The weird thing about people who become successful is that they don’t understand that they now have the freedom to let their guard down: you know – it’s fine’.” – New Statesman
Putin Enlists Major Cultural Leaders To Rewrite Russian Constitution
Wasting no time, the Kremlin on Wednesday posted a list of 75 members of a working group appointed to draft the constitutional amendments, including a range of political and cultural figures. Among them are Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and Zelfira Tregulova, the director of Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, both seasoned political players. Both were among the public figures who served as his 2018 presidential campaign confidants. – The Art Newspaper
Bird Killers – Our Glass Buildings
All told, glass buildings are responsible for up to one billion bird deaths in the United States each year. At a time when two-thirds of North American birds are in danger of extinction from climate change, it’s no exaggeration to say that glass architecture is a threat to life on Earth. Yet buildings sheathed in smooth glass walls continue to go up, not because they are cheaper to construct or better from an architectural standpoint, but because they embody modern luxury. – The New Republic
“Jeopardy” Now Has Its All-Time Champ. But Why Did It Need One?
Elsewhere, we carp, battle and grind one another down for bragging rights and total triumph. Sports culture and champion-making has seeped into nearly every aspect of life. It’s all just a little (or a lot) more elbowy and contentious — primary campaigns, award show nominations, lists of the decade’s best albums. – Washington Post