Manipulation of our media environment by foreign as well as domestic actors is now the new normal. “If anything has changed since 2016,” writes one experienced reporter, “it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s the terrain on which our entire political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape our everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are nearly endless. – The Guardian
Author: Douglas McLennan
Chicago Lyric Opera’s Subscription Problem
The decline in subscribers is upending the already fragile economics of opera, changing how companies operate and what they program. Lyric now gives a quarter fewer main stage opera performances than it did two decades ago — it gave 60 last season — and has started presenting a musical each spring. – The New York Times
JS Bach, Master Recycler
When Bach’s heavy reliance on parody technique came to light in the nineteenth century, scholars found it embarrassing. It ran counter to the Beethovenian principle that composers must write new, highly original pieces, and the realization that several of the St. Thomas Cantor’s most-revered sacred works—the Christmas Oratorio and the Mass in B-Minor, in particular—were derived largely from secular tributes to earthly kings and queens was difficult to accept. In more recent times, scholars have moved beyond those prejudices and embraced Bach’s use of parody, devoting much study to the brilliant ways in which he carried it out. – New York Review of Books
Is Culture Just Bias In Job Interviews?
The most common method for evaluating a candidate’s potential is the unstructured job interview, which is a weak predictor of future job performance. The interview is especially used to assess culture fit. At worst, it boils down to a gut feeling of good chemistry or rapport that interviewers get from the candidate. At best, this results in well-meaning interviewers trying to ignore the very factors that cause that experience, such as charisma, attractiveness, and likability, as well as any attributes or background they share with the candidate. – Fast Company
A Writer Heads To The Woods To Escape Noise. Here’s What She Learned
A writer I admire once told me, “few people have an imagination when it comes to their lives.” I loved this. It flipped the notion that everyone was doing life right except for me — the common refrain of my consciousness — squarely on its head. The fact that I had abandoned my career at 35 for a pipe dream, didn’t have a partner, and was leaving the greatest city in the world to spend the summer writing in a cabin alone wasn’t wrong, it was imaginative. – Medium
A Venerable Christmas Day Tradition (According To Data): Chinese Food
The tradition has its roots in religion, of course, but also in immigration patterns. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish people were one of the largest non-Christian immigrant groups in the United States, as were Chinese people. That meant there were new populations that, by and large, didn’t see December 25th as a holiday. While most other shops and restaurants in U.S. cities closed their doors for a day, many Jewish and Chinese immigrants found something of a shared experience. – CityLab
Liverpool Crowdsources A New Logo Design. Designers Decry Exploitation
The authority shared the call for submissions on Twitter earlier this month, asking: “Do you have a passion for design and creative branding development? Can you create a simple but visually impactful logo that captures the spirit of an exciting cultural and creative programme?” But the message attracted more than a dozen critical responses, with several users seeing the competition as a request for design work at below market rates. – Arts Professional
My New Best Friend Is A Computer – But How Does It Feel About Me?
Can computers actually think? Well, they are designed to perform functions that humans perform through thinking. They expertly process information, present it at appropriate points in a conversation, and use it to draw reasonable conclusions. But thinking in this sense can just be a kind of high-level functioning. It’s another question whether iPals’ calculations are accompanied by a subjective awareness of what they’re doing. – Commonweal
How The NBA Exploits Its Dancers
If the body-shaming tactics allegedly employed by many NBA dance teams are troubling, the dancers’ stories suggest that the compensation is worse. Three women remembered getting paid $50 a game; one said she took home $65. Three others said they made just $25 a practice, and one said that she and her teammates weren’t paid for practice at all. To put all that in perspective, the average price of a single NBA ticket during the 2012-2013 season (the earliest year this salary was mentioned) was $50. – Yahoo News
Fortnite Made Dance Moves Fabulously Lucrative. So Now The Courts Have To Figure Out Who Owns What
“There’s no definitive case law determining this.” When the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed, it finally established rules around choreography, with some limited fair use cases around criticism and dance education. Strangely enough, it covered even pantomime, but not an individual dance move as we’ve culturally come to understand it in the ensuing decades. – The Verge