It’s Masur’s efforts orchestrating peace that Google highlights in a doodle Wednesday celebrating the conductor’s 91st birthday. In 1989, when Leipzig was at the center of the pro-democracy movement that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall, Masur was part of a group that helped avert a confrontation between protesters and police that could have led to bloodshed.
Author: Douglas McLennan
#MeToo Charges Are Roiling Baltimore’s Performing Arts
“Organizations of all sizes have been caught off guard by the #MeToo movement. But small organizations can be at an extra disadvantage because they often lack the resources of larger groups. When a sexual harassment accusation gets made at a smaller company, it can become a community-wide problem. When something happens in your neighborhood, it feels different than it does when it happens in New York City.”
Trump Appoints Acting Head Of The National Endowment For The Arts
While some have decried the decision, pointing out that Mary Anne Carter’s primary form of engagement with the arts is piloting the dance career of her young daughter, who attends a school for the arts and dances competitively, it makes a refreshing break from a pattern established by Trump’s early appointees, to choose department heads that appear actively opposed to the discipline their agency is intended to manage and protect — for example, installing Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, when her most significant achievement is the dismantling of Michigan’s public school system.
What The Success Of Netflix Tells Us About Competition, Ideas, And Data
Here are three lessons from the rise of Netflix that apply to every company: Big data is powerful, but big data plus big ideas is transformational. Netflix is a technology juggernaut whose analytics, algorithms, and digital-streaming innovations have changed how customers watch movies and TV shows. But this technology has always been in service of a unique point of view — building a platform that shapes what customers watch, not just how they watch.
Why It’s Difficult To Tell Whether Things Are Getting Better Or Worse
Was the past good or bad? Are we on the right track or the wrong one? Is life getting better or worse? These questions are easy to ask—pollsters and politicians love asking them—but surprisingly hard to answer.
After All The Digital Theory, A Return To Making Real, Physical Art
Many of them, after having been exposed to the high-tech side of what a well-equipped institution has to offer, change direction to embrace a more hands-on, traditional way of making and ultimately learning. These students, after graduating, end up being builders of things — and not very interested in creating objects without having some physical input into its creation. After all the design philosophy and all the classes that teach design theories, this group ends up doing what attracted them in the first place to an art and design university — the making of things.
What Iris Murdoch Said About The Role Of Artists In Fraught Times
“Good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves. Literature stirs and satisfies our curiosity, it interests us in other people and other scenes, and helps us to be tolerant and generous. Art is informative. And even mediocre art can tell us something, for instance about how other people live. But to say this is not to hold a utilitarian or didactic view of art. Art is larger than such narrow ideas.”
Next Year’s Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times
About the title’s provenance as an aged curse with a note of wryness in it, curator Ralph Rugoff said, “In this case it turns out that there never was any such ‘ancient Chinese curse,’ despite the fact that Western politicians have made reference to it in speeches for over a hundred years. It is an ersatz cultural relic, another Occidental ‘Orientalism,’ and yet for all its fictional status it has had real rhetorical effects in significant public exchanges.
Toasters Are Your Gateway To Artificial Intelligence
Developers who train machine-learning algorithms have found that it often makes sense to build toasters rather than wonder-boxes. That might seem counterintuitive, because the AIs of Western science fiction tend to resemble C-3PO in Star Wars or WALL-E in the eponymous film – examples of artificial general intelligence (AGI), automata that can interact with the world like a human, and handle many different tasks. But many companies are invisibly – and successfully – using machine learning to achieve much more limited goals.
Can New Technology Finally Read Ancient Scrolls Buried By Vesuvius?
The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal.