Unfortunately, big-ticket philanthropy is in the middle of a protracted sea change that is already having a direct effect on the arts. Thirteen years ago, the Journal reported that younger new-money donors were increasingly choosing to give it not to fine-arts organizations but to humanitarian causes like AIDS research and education reform. In 2013, Bill Gates put his seal of moral approval on this new tendency by declaring in an interview with the Financial Times that donating money “to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness” was, in his words, “slightly barbaric.” – The Wall Street Journal [paywall]
Author: Douglas McLennan
Study Suggests That Small Teams Of Scientists Are More Innovative Than Large Ones
In the largest analysis of the issue thus far, investigators have found that the smaller the research team working on a problem, the more likely it was to generate innovative solutions. Large consortiums are still important drivers of progress, but they are best suited to confirming or consolidating novel findings, rather than generating them. – The New York Times
Did Dan Mallory Also Plagiarize His Best-Selling Novel? (Along With His Other Problems)
The parallels are numerous, and detailed. Both novels feature anxiety-ridden, middle-aged female narrators who are afraid to leave their homes, and they witness something suspicious while spying on neighbors. The stories have nearly identical plot twists in the final act. “It is the EXACT same plot like down to the main characters’ back story,” one person wrote in an Amazon review comparing the two books. “Sorry but there’s no way the amount of stolen material is a coincidence.” – The New York Times
Falling Into The Rabbit Hole Of The Internet (Never To Be Seen Again)
Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them – or believed we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth. – London Review of Books
Why We Dance: Six Seattle Dancers Explain
Staying in love with dance takes grit. Choosing to pursue a lifelong relationship with dance involves the risk of physical injury, financial instability and the ups and downs inherent in a creative passion-driven career. – Crosscut
Leonard Pitts: On Writing About Race In America
“A simple thought experiment illustrates the point. If asked to define black literature, you would likely—and promptly—invoke Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison or some other dark-skinned giant of the written word. But what if you were asked to define “white” literature? The mind quails and resists, does it not?” – LitHub
We Need A Different Way Of Thinking About Digital Art
The art market is tied to the system of uniqueness. It is still hard to sell digital files on sticks. But uniqueness contradicts with the nature of digital work, as digital files are identical and can be copied endlessly. This cries out for a new attitude towards digital art and its value that does not lie in uniqueness. It is the opposite. It lies in the accessibility of the works for everyone, from every part of the world. – The Observer
The Viral Influencer Market – How Organizing Attention Works
Sociologists Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport have studied the ways that protest tactics and schemes have spread out of political culture and into other spaces, especially entertainment. They coined the phrase “ubiquitous movement practices” to describe how petitions, boycotts, and the like—once tactics used solely for political goals—are now deployed across all kinds of social and cultural concerns from trying to ensure Family Guy remains on the air to trying to get the Postal Service “to issue a Marx Brothers stamp.” – The Atlantic
Blow My Mind: How The Brain Constructs Timelines Of Memories
For us, time is a sequence of events, a measure of gradually changing content. That explains why we remember recent events better than ones from long ago, and why when a certain memory comes to mind, we tend to recall events that occurred around the same time. But how did that add up to an ordered temporal history, and what neural mechanism enabled it? – Quanta Magazine
Steven Soderbergh On How The Movies Have (Are) Changing
“What I don’t understand is why everyone in this business thinks there is one template that is gonna be the unified field theory of “windowing” [or how long a movie screens in theaters]. The minute that I knew, which is usually around Friday at noon, that Logan Lucky wasn’t going to work and that Unsane was definitely not gonna work—as soon as that happens, the studio should let me drop the movie on a platform the next week.” – The Atlantic