“Tell me if this sounds familiar: you just turned off the light, your head is on the pillow, your eyes are closed, and yet, instead of drifting off to dreamland, you find yourself thinking about something that happened earlier in the day. Surprisingly, this process of reactivating your memories occurs even when you aren’t aware of it, and not only is it normal, it might actually improve your memory. As a second-language researcher, I am especially interested in harnessing this phenomenon to help people learn new languages.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Remember Desktop Publishing? And The Print Shop?
“The desktop publishing era, short as it was, did something really important: It turned the process of publishing into something anyone could do cheaply and professionally. … In its original form, [The Print Shop] was an ’80s-tastic program that redefined the parameters of print design into something that could literally be called child’s play. Today’s Tedium considers the ramifications of the software platform from which a million dot matrix paper banners were born.”
Adverbs Are Cheap? That’s Ridiculously Wrong-Headed
Colin Dickey: “Who will speak on the adverb’s behalf? For once again, it would seem, it is under attack. … We desperately lack a full-throated defense of this runt of the grammatical litter. We need an outright celebration of adverbs, and it is that celebration that I offer – stridently, boisterously, unapologetically.”
The Painting That Put An End To Picasso’s Cubism
“Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, done in 1958, is a defining and appalling statement of [Hannah] Arendt’s post-epic perspective. It aims to put the era of Guernica behind it.” T.J. Clark looks at both how Picasso created the mural and the contention surrounding its commission for the new UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Voice-Recognition Technology Will Kill ‘All Things Considered’, Says Ex-NPR Exec
Steve Lickteig: “Here’s what I think the future sounds like: You will get in your car and say, ‘Play my news briefing, plus all of last night’s baseball scores, including highlights from the Yankees game. Oh, and give me last week’s Vows column from the New York Times.’ Then, like magic, your audio system will assemble this playlist. That news briefing you asked for? It will come from sources you pre-selected, places like NPR and news organizations yet to be created.”
Why So Many Facebook Live Videos Are So Bad – A TV Critic Explains
Willa Paskin: “Where Vine has fetishized brevity and Snapchat ephemerality, Facebook Live encourages video-creators to go long, more than five minutes and up to 90, and caches its videos. … The formal innovations of Facebook Live are length and durability, along with the ‘live’ aspect. And yet so far very few Facebook Live videos have figured out how to capitalize on any of this at all.”
Nine Things About Classical Concerts That Need To Change
Michael Vincent: “If classical music is ever going move beyond a reputation for stiff upper lips, it’s time to start to look carefully at the conventions that have formed around the concert ritual. Here are my picks for 10 [sic] things that should change about classical music. Feel free to contribute your own to the comments below.”
Six Words Of Arts-Professional Jargon That Could Just Make You Want To Puke
“There’s a small subset of words that trigger this nauseous reaction when we encounter them. We want to analyse what it is about these words that makes them so objectionable to us. They sit at the intersection of Jargon, Buzzwords, and Office Speak.”
Teenage Audience Member Jumps From Top Balcony During ‘Grease’
“A teenager has been seriously injured after jumping from an upper circle balcony during a performance of Grease at Blackpool’s Grand Theatre. … His injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.”
Art Historian Goes Inside ISIS’s Trade In Looted Antiquities
“Everyone seems to agree that ISIS is digging up and selling archaeological artifacts to make money. But no one seems to agree on how much money it’s actually making from its illegal antiquities trade: amounts have ranged from US$4 million to $7 billion.” The University of Chicago’s Fiona Rose-Greenland has formed a research team – called MANTIS – to find out.