Gregory Tucker: “What has long been hailed as Baltimore’s ‘other major league team’ is about to risk losing its major-league status. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Directors, of which I was a member until this past June, has decided that Baltimore and Maryland can no longer afford a major league symphony orchestra, given what are real and persistent financial challenges. It is proposing cutting the season by 12 weeks.” – Washington Post
Author: Douglas McLennan
Consider The Lowly Pushbutton – A Challenge To Our Humanity?
And yet, that’s what some thought when push buttons first appeared on machines: “Do you not think that this prodigious diffusion of mechanism is likely to render the world terribly monotonous and fastidious? To deal no longer with men, but to be dependent on things!” Pushing buttons made life too easy, too simplistic, or too rote, when a single finger-action could conjure one’s desires. – Aeon
Podcasters In Search Of A Business Model
Audiences for podcasts are growing quickly. And the number of podcasts is also exploding. Podcasters are scrambling to find ways to support their work and business models that work.
Ballet Specifically For TV As A Way To Get Kids Interested In Dance
Shot as 40-minute films in vibrant high-definition colours, the Bite-Sized Ballets series will kick off with an adaptation of the Tortoise & the Hare, to be followed by Elves & the Shoemaker and Three Little Pigs. At the start of each film, the story is narrated on screen and dance instructors show children how to do some of the moves to create a sort of dancealong. – The Guardian
Can Onerous Grant Reporting (We’re Bored Already) Be Made More Meaningful?
Often, reporting results after a grant can be long, arduous and ultimately not of much use. To anyone. So now there’s a new initiative to see if reporting can be made more useful and less cumbersome. After all, we all hope that grants make an impact, right? – Arts Professional
How Do You Cast Kids Who Are Supposed To Be Musical Prodigies?
The “School of Rock” features very talented students who can really play their instruments and sing. So just where do you find the talent that can carry the show?
New Psychological Studies Try To Answer Classic Questions About Art
“Today, experimental philosophers and philosophically inclined psychologists are designing experiments that can help to answer some of the big philosophical questions about the nature of art and how we experience it – questions that have puzzled people for centuries, such as: why do we prefer original works of art to forgeries? How do we decide what is good art? And does engaging with the arts make us better human beings?” – Aeon
We Live In An Adversarial Culture. Historians At Their Best Offer A Different Approach
“The virtue of reading like a historian is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.” – Aeon
Intentional Forgetting May Be A Good Strategy For Remembering
“Traditionally, forgetting has been regarded as a passive decay over time of the information recorded and stored in the brain. But while some memories may simply fade away like ink on paper exposed to sunlight, recent research suggests that forgetting is often more intentional, with erasure orchestrated by elaborate cellular and molecular mechanisms.” – The Atlantic
Stratford CT’s American Shakesepeare Theatre Burns To The Ground
The mayor called the structure an “iconic and historic theater that holds a special place in the hearts of Stratford residents.” The fire was just devastating, she said. – Hartford Courant