“To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.” – The Atlantic
Author: Douglas McLennan
Can The Shed Save The Soul Of Hudson Yards?
Zachary Small: “The answer is a thumping no. The cultural keystone of the Far West Side development is a haughty hybrid-performance venue in a city already overflowing with them at places like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, Performance Space New York, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.” – Hyperallergic
The New Faces Of Classical Music?
Many of the best young players coming out of music conservatories aren’t headed for orchestra jobs (there aren’t many of those). Instead they’re forming ensembles with hip names, and exploring music of our time. – San Francisco Classical Voice
The Shed Promised A Different Kind Of Arts Space: Here’s What The Critics Thought Of The First Weekend
The Shed is unconventional. Unusual building, unusual spaces, and a different way of engaging with artists and audiences. The opening weekend was a first chance to see what all the unusuals added up to. Critics’ verdicts? Interesting, maybe, but no one was blown away. – The New York Times
A Data Scientist Makes A Case Against Big Data Analysis Of Literature
“The basic criteria should always be to not confuse what happens mechanically with insight, to not needlessly use statistical tools for far simpler operations, to present inferences that are both statistically sound and argumentatively meaningful, and to make sure that functional operations would not be far faster and more accurate if someone just read the texts. It may be the case that computational textual analysis has a threshold of optimal utility, and literature—in particular, reading literature well—is that cut-off point.” – Critical Inquiry
The Music Genre Wars: Does It Matter How You Label It?
In the 1920s, with the creation of the record industry that followed the development of recording technology and the pre-Depression economic boom, genre began to shift from function to demographics of consumption. Genre became, in music industry parlance, format: defined by who was buying and listening to the record. Immediately, this demographic slotting took on explicitly racial dimensions. – Pacific Standard
The Chaotic Genius Of Gwen Verdon And Bob Fosse Through The Eyes Of Their Daughter
It goes without saying that Fosse and Verdon are far from the only people ever to struggle with internal conflict and resort to self-deception. It’s by virtue of their inner landscape, rather than their glamour and artistic labors, that audiences can find common ground with them. – Washington Post
Trust No One? A Class In Bullshit Examines Our Truth Detectors
Academia being what it is (a place where everything is contested), there has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit. Most of that debate centers on the question of intention. Is bullshit considered bullshit if the deception was unintentionally presented? – Pacific Standard
A Life Without Boredom: The War For Your Attention
The war for your attention is a zero-sum game. If Netflix retains four hours of your day, that’s four hours HBO can’t get. The way for companies to remain competitive is to ensure a never-ending stream of content, which is how we reached the era of content overload. This is how boredom, as a state of existence, died. – OneZero
They Told Us The Digital Revolution Would Make Our Lives Better. It Hasn’t Turned Out That Way
Douglas Rushkoff: “In some ways, we’re all hostage to our technologies, or we’re simply at the mercy of this system. We’re being steamrolled by our devices, and the result is a kind of emotional slavery. And we know that billions of dollars are going into applying everything, every nasty trick we know about behavioral finance, to the digital realm.” – Vox