Douglas McLennan – Page 274 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Boston Review’s Ten Great Reads Of The 2010s

From Noam Chomsky on the responsibility of intellectuals after 9/11, to our forum on why empathy can be a bad thing, the following were all ambitious efforts and help chart a decade of thinking. – Boston Review

Minneapolis Institute Of Art Sees A Record Year

“Egypt’s Sunken Cities” helped the museum double its income from program activities to $4.9 million in the year ended June 30. Membership increased 30 percent to 52,102 members, and attendance grew to 779,973, up by more than 69,000. – The Star-Tribune (Mpls)

Does All Music Have Something In Common?

Yes, every culture that we know of has some kind of music—but do these diverse musics share anything in common, for example in terms of function, affect and content? An extensive ethnographic study published in Science in November presented the case that they do. – Prospect

How Robert Moses Transformed The Metropolitan Museum

Wags had taken to calling the Met the Necropolitan and said it suffered from hardening of the galleries. The New Yorker sniped that the acting director still wrote with a quill pen and considered theories about the democracy of art to be “so much parlor Socialism.” Moses disdained the old families who’d run the place since its founding. – The Daily Beast

Why Our New Year’s “Starting Over” Motivations Don’t Work

Results from six studies support this idea that focusing on the pursuit of a goal can be helpful in the long term. The researchers encouraged more than 1,600 people who had just achieved a personal goal to reflect on their recent success through the lens of either a “destination” or a “journey.” They found that those who thought about their goal as part of a journey were more likely to continue making progress towards it—even though they’d supposedly already achieved it. – Nautilus

Opera Star Peter Schreier, 84

He performed at the Berlin State Opera in his native East Germany and at Milan’s La Scala, as well as a 25-year run at the famed Salzburg festival. One of his specialties was performing and recording the songs of composers Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. – Washington Post (AP)

The Recycling Con

Bailing out the recycling industry may sound like a benign proposal. The funds might even be a wise infusion at such a precarious moment for scrap buyers, processors, and sellers. But the hazy aspirations of the RECOVER Act are just the latest cover in a long-running deceit that for more than half a century has deflected responsibility from the companies who profit from pollution while ensuring our broader waste problem goes unaddressed. – The Baffler

Burning Man Sues US Government Over Sharply Rising Fees

In 2012, Burning Man organizers reimbursed the BLM nearly $1.4 million in expenses, a 60 per cent year-over-year increase, though the event population increased by only 4 per cent that year, according to the lawsuit. The following year, the same bill was $2.9 million, according to the lawsuit. In three years, the cost recovery charges increased by 291 per cent, and the Burning Man event population increased by 39 per cent, Black Rock City attorneys said. CBC (AP)

50 Years At The Church (Literally) Of John Coltrane

For Franzo and Marina King, who had begun taking Coltrane’s music and ideas seriously as a world view, he had not passed away. He had merely ascended. Franzo had always imagined becoming a preacher one day. He had now found his God. The Kings’ jazz club was refashioned into a temple, where members participated in the organizing and uplift common in the Bay Area of the sixties. – The New Yorker

Ten Books That Shaped And Changed The 2010s

From “The Big Short” to Naomi Klein to “Normal People,” a list of books that made an impact. – The Guardian