“It found students who took an elective arts class in sixth, seventh, or eighth grade had significantly higher grade point averages (GPAs), and better scores on standardized reading and math tests, than their peers who were not exposed to the arts. This held true after the researchers took into account “all the ways that students who did and did not take the arts in middle school were initially different.” – Pacific Standard
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Did The Shed Raise Nearly Half A Billion Dollars For A Building That Has Never Been Done Before?
The takeaway? Raising money in an arts philanthropy climate focused on issues like equity and access is not a zero-sum game. You can build a modern and expensive new building and roll out programming aligned with the pressing issues of the day. – Inside Philanthropy
How Neuroscience Is Going to Change The Business Of Finding An Audience
Neuroscience, it turns out, can help change how companies think about new opportunities, and specifically, within the emerging field of applied neuroscience. Applied neuroscience is best described as the use of neuroscience tools and insights to measure and understand human behavior. Using applied neuroscience, leaders are able to generate data about critical moments of decision making, and then use this data to make confident choices that help to navigate the future of an initiative. – Harvard Business Review
How The Red Carpet Became Such A Thing
Although the red carpet has been a part of Hollywood premières since the silent era and a part of the Academy Awards since the early sixties, it became a beast unto itself in large part because of Joan Rivers, who began hosting her barbed red-carpet specials in the nineties, with her daughter, Melissa. The “Joan Rivers effect” made the whole enterprise funnier and—for the starlets on display—scarier. Soon the red carpet became its own cottage industry, with the E! network employing such dubious innovations as the “Glam Cam 360” and picking outfits apart on “Fashion Police.” – The New Yorker
The Cities That Fall Into A Branding Trap
“Look at any piece of city marketing material, from promo videos to airline magazine ad inserts. It’s amazing how so many of them rely on the same basic ingredients: hipster coffee shops, microbreweries, bike lanes, creative-class members, startups, intimations of a fashion scene, farm-to-table restaurants, new downtown streetcars, etc. These are all good things, mind you: things cities should be happy to have. Some of them may even be modern necessities. But you can’t help but notice how few unique things about these cities manage to come through.” – CityLab
How This Year’s Oscar Nominees Got To Be Oscar Nominees
Only so many movies are chosen, and the road isn’t straight. Here is a movie-by-movie account of how each got to be a best picture nominee. – Deadline
Disability As Strength – Except When Portrayed As Cliche In The Theatre
“Modern thinking around disability looks to a social model: people are disabled by society’s structures, the stairs they can’t climb and the doors a wheelchair can’t fit though are simple examples. It’s the job we can’t get, because having a disability is viewed as an inherent weakness rather than living with it being a demonstration of strength.” – The Guardian
What Makes Us Human: Laughter?
Something that sets us apart from these ancestors and primate relatives, and should be of special interest to anthropology, is our unique propensity to laugh. Laughter is a paradox. We all know it’s good for us; we experience it as one of life’s pleasures and a form of emotional release. Yet to be able to laugh, we must somehow cut ourselves off from feelings of love, hate, fear or any other powerful emotion. – Aeon
A Sense Of Doom In The Air (What, Me Worry?)
“Since the financial crash of 2008, across Europe and in the United States, there has been (to borrow a phrase from Frank Kermode) a “sense of an ending”. Liberal orthodoxies have fallen into radical doubt. Populist movements are arrayed against the political and economic order that has stood in place for the past fifty years. Electorates have leaped into unknown futures. The grounds of civilization won’t break up under our feet so much as recede under melting ice caps and rising seas, while the indices of progress – life expectancy, equality, happiness and trust in political institutions – have gone into reverse in many parts of the world.” – Times Literary Supplement
A Prescient Warning From 1994 About Dangers Of A Distraction Culture
Writing in 1994, Sven Birkerts worried that distractedness and surficiality would win out. The “duration state” we enter through a turned page would be lost in a world of increasing speed and relentless connectivity, and with it our ability to make meaning out of narratives, both fictional and lived. The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness. – Paris Review