“The report makes a direct comparison between choirs and amateur sports clubs, noting that while around 300,000 more people sing in choirs than play amateur football, football receives £30m in funding every year – compared with under £500k a year for choirs.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
What Is The Cure For A Love Of Culture? Why, More Culture, Of Course
“So what do you do when you have the fever and work in a field more or less unrelated to your love for Friedrich Nietzsche and Emily Dickinson? Naturally, you spend your off hours reading books and talking about them with others who share the fever. There are legions of us, and in truth I’m one of the more dilettantish members of the tribe.”
Linguistic Theory Is So Abstract, Maybe It’s Not Really A Science?
“The nub of the disagreement here boils down to what exactly linguistics says about the world, and the appropriate archetypes we should apply to make it effective. So just what kinds of questions does linguistics want to answer? What counts as evidence? Is universal grammar in particular – and theoretical linguistics in general – a science at all?”
Study: Yoga Might Slow Cognitive Decline (Scientists Don’t Know Why)
Compared to their counterparts, the longtime yoga practitioners showed significantly greater cortical thickness “in left prefrontal lobe areas associated with attention and other executive functions,” the researchers report. Previous research has linked activity in this area of the brain with language and memory.
Tomb-Robbing Has Become A Very Big Business In China
“With prices for some Chinese antiquities reaching into the tens of millions of dollars, a flood of amateur and professional thieves looking to get rich quick has hit China’s countryside. While accurate figures are difficult to come by, the looting has resulted in the permanent destruction of numerous Chinese cultural heritage sites.”
Louvre Says Violent Storm Damaged Some Of Its Art
“The French museum confirmed that water had invaded the mezzanine of the Denon wing, affecting the “Arts of Islam” and “From the Mediterranean Orient to Roman Times” rooms, both of which have been closed pending hygrometric stabilization. Water also entered the first floor of the Sully wing, affecting the “Salle des Sept-Cheminées” and Henri IV staircase, and the second floor of the Cour Carrée, affecting some rooms housing French paintings.”
The Maddening, Infuriating, Surreal Road For Syrian Actors Trying To Get To The US To Perform
“The play’s lead actor, Mohamad Alrefai, showed up for his first interview at the United States Embassy in Beirut eager to introduce himself and to show his supporting documents for a visa, only to be told by an American consular official to keep his mouth shut, he recalled, and his stack of papers to himself. Several members of the group were asked to furnish their social media handles so American officials could read what they had posted. The director, Omar Abusaada, said he was asked if he belonged to a terrorist organization. “Would an actual terrorist say yes?” he later wondered aloud.”
“Game Of Thrones” Is A Global Blockbuster Phenomenon. Here’s How That Happened
“We’d expect changes wrought by the internet to have played a key role. They did, but not in the way you’d expect. HBO didn’t use the internet to distribute “Game of Thrones” to subscribers around the world like Netflix and Amazon Video have done with their series. Instead, the internet was important to the series’ global growth because of the opportunities it gave fans to interact with one another.”
Experts: Social Media Is Dumbing Down Our Communication
Experts who look into such things say that while social networking has its benefits — professionally, personally, politically — it’s also dumbing down the ways people communicate with each other. Having so many channels of communication has overwhelmed our ability to thoughtfully interact online, encouraging cheap and easy forms of communication.
Neuroscience Is Confirming Why Some Buildings Work And Some Don’t
“I realized that our paradigm of understanding how people experience their environments had radically shifted, and no one had really figured out what this meant. One of the things I found was that, basically, [given] what we now know about human cognition and perception, the built environments we inhabit are drastically more important than we ever thought they were.”