Author: Douglas McLennan

Itzhak Perlman At 75

Mr. Perlman has been so ubiquitous that it is easy to take for granted his status as “the reigning virtuoso of the violin,” as his marketing materials put it. But with his 75th birthday arriving on Aug. 31, this may be a moment to reassess how that reign began and what has happened to the realm and all the superlatives. – The New York Times

NYC’s Ambitious Arts Diversity Plan? Who Can Tell What’s Working?

Under the plan, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to hold august institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall accountable for hiring more members of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups and for making their boards of directors and other leadership ranks more inclusive. But the Department of Cultural Affairs did not set numerical goals for what constituted progress, nor did it require that institutions provide baseline demographic statistics about their staffs. – The New York Times

Sean Connery At 90 (Yes, 90)

Connery nonetheless celebrates his advance on a tenth decade as an avatar of old-fashioned masculinity. His role as James Bond — hating the Beatles at the height of the their success — helped position those attitudes within inverted commas. He went from playing grumpy young men to grumpy old men. He became the most famous Scot in the world. Peter Jackson tried to lure him into the role of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. Fans have wondered if he might return to Indiana Jones. But Connery isn’t playing. – Irish Times

Why Don’t Orchestras Improvise?

“There’s a language there, and the language comes out of so many years of study. And the idea that the orchestra can’t move a couple of paces in a certain direction toward what they would do, even as they move many paces to use orchestral notation — to try to codify things in a language that these players appreciate and are familiar with — I find that dynamic odd. Because this is the music of today.” – The New York Times

DC Fan Dome Sets The Gold Standard (So Far) For Virtual Events

Virtual conventions are long. People are watching at home, in their rooms, instead of in giant ballrooms packed with other excited fans. Trying to bring some of that convention energy to people digitally is immensely difficult, but what FanDome proved is that figuring out pacing and giving audiences something to actually look at in place of Zoom call screens they’re already exhausted by goes a long way. – The Verge

Why It’s Hard To Determine Happiness

If we cured all the world’s cancers, made the perfect smartphone and achieved the ideal form of representative government, but everyone was just as miserable after as they were before, then — did any of it matter? I think it is at least plausible that happiness, in some nebulous and hard-to-define but nonetheless real sense, is the most important thing in the universe. – Unherd

Online Learning Is Changing Our Brains. We Need To Understand How

“To skim to inform” is the new norm for reading. What goes missing are deep reading processes which require a quality of attention increasingly at risk in a culture and on a medium in which constant distraction bifurcates our attention. These processes include connecting background knowledge to new information, making analogies, drawing inferences, examining truth value, passing over into the perspectives of others (expanding empathy and knowledge), and integrating everything into critical analysis. Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought. – The Guardian

How Good Teachers Cultivate Wonder

While it is certainly not inevitable that children lose their sense of wonder as they grow up, and while adults are in principle as capable of experiencing wonder as children, it is to be expected that, as the world becomes more and more familiar to children as they age, they will experience wonder less readily. It increasingly requires effort to see how extraordinary the world and everything in it is. Familiarity – even if it implies no real understanding at all – can dull the sense of mystery. – Psyche