Beginning next month, the Times will cease running daily political cartoons in its international edition, editorial page editor James Bennet said Monday in a statement — a move that brings the overseas newspaper “into line with the domestic paper,” which in recent years had ceased running weekly roundups of syndicated cartoons and experimented instead with longer-form editorial comics. – Washington Post
Author: Douglas McLennan
Study Suggests That Human Brains Are Wired For Musical Pitch
“We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains. The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain.” – EurekArt
The Forces That Create Celebrity Culture
Social media amplifies and speeds up interactions between audiences, media and stars, but YouTube and Twitter did not invent modern celebrity culture. That happened more than 150 years ago, thanks to the popular press, commercial photography, railways and steamships, and national postal systems. – Aeon
Designing For A More Circular World
“Today’s linear economy is a straight line, no matter how efficient you make it. If you make a car with less material, if you make a car using less energy, you’re still using stuff. You’re still consuming materials. Whereas within a circular model, from the outset you design in a way whereby that product comes back into the system: the components are recovered, the materials are recovered.” – dezeen
Next Challenge For Virtual Reality: How Do You Register Emotion?
“Emotions are more complex and socially determined than the simple positive-negative, strong-weak arousal model suggests. Even distinguishing fear, anxiety and disgust on physiological grounds turns out to be extremely problematic.” – The Daily Beast
Hartford Stage Gets New Director
Cynthia Rider, who was executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 2013 to 2018, will begin her new job at Hartford Stage July 1, the theater announced Wednesday. – Hartford Courant
A Timeline Of Barnes & Noble’s Storied History
Founded in 1971, the worldwide chain enjoyed decades of dominance in the book retail market — until the internet blew up. – New York Magazine
A Case For Cutting Back Our Digital Clutter
By depriving ourselves of face-to-face contact with others, we widen the sea of angst that no amount of “likes” can ever hope to bridge. This phenomenon is borne out by research into college-age students, who experienced a radical increase in anxiety-related disorders around 2011, the same year that smartphones became widely available to consumers and teenagers began owning their own phones. – Los Angeles Review of Books
A Disaster For Music: How A 2008 Fire Destroyed One Of The World’s Most Important Troves Of Music
UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost. – The New York Times
Concerns That Arts Council England Is Stepping Away From Funding Excellence
“Some members felt that the proposals were signalling a profound shift from ‘Great Art and Culture for Everyone’ to ‘Everyone has the right to access some art and culture’.” They “felt very strongly that the outcomes suggested the only justification for publicly funded arts and culture was public demand”. – Arts Professional