“If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you’ll need more than hype and a loaded iPod. You gotta get in there and play. Or sing, bang or pluck.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Music Helps People To Heal — But How?
“While music therapists use a mix of improvisation and proven techniques to help patients, neuroscientists are looking to uncover the scientific basis for music’s healing powers. They are trying to understand how music can help rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for injured or underperforming brain regions.”
Faced With E-Book Pricing, Publishers Do The Math
“Just how much does it actually cost to produce a printed book versus a digital one? Publishers differ on how they account for various costs, but a composite, and necessarily simplified, picture might look like this….”
People Stop Flying, And A Bookseller Goes Broke
“Difficulties in negotiating lower rents and a collapse in passenger numbers at Dublin and Cork airports, where the majority of its business is generated, were blamed for the insolvency” of Ireland’s Hughes & Hughes bookstore chain.
Holden And Andy, More Alike Than You’d Have Thought
Like Holden Caulfield, Andy Warhol “never felt like ‘going into it.’ … Nowhere in his flat, crass and affectless silkscreened pictures of Marilyn, Liz or Jackie lay the slightest hint of what his childhood was like or how his parents were occupied before they had him or any of that David Copperfield kind of crap.”
Fearing Digital Future, Publishing Fails To See Possibilities
“With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them…. New technologies, however, do not await permission.”
Did A Theatre Go Under Because Its Board Moved Too Fast?
“Clearly trustees take the risk, and therefore must be the people to decide whether it is viable to continue,” but the financial condition of Exeter’s Northcott theatre, like the decision to put it into administration, “raises issues about the quality and expertise of the people acting as regional theatre trustees.”
Altruism: Harder Than It Looks
A guy who had trouble giving away umbrellas in a rainstorm “was one of a dozen people in San Francisco who had been given $100 by a startup charity that is trying to get strangers to start doing nice things for other strangers. … Most folks, it turns out, aren’t prepared for it. ‘What’s the catch?’ a man asked.”
Nancy Sweezy, Who Rescued Jugtown Pottery, Dies At 88
“Ms. Sweezy begged and borrowed $22,500 to buy the financially staggering Jugtown in 1968. … In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts designated Ms. Sweezy ‘a national treasure,’ saying that her efforts had ‘helped inspire a revival of the traditional pottery community.'”
Humanities Funding On The Chopping Block In Virginia
“The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities stands to lose $290,000 in state funding in the next fiscal year and have all remaining support — more than $1 million — withdrawn in 2011, according to a proposed budget. The foundation runs more than 20 statewide programs on literature, history and culture, including the Virginia Festival of the Book.”