“The Dec. 7 season [opening] at Milan’s La Scala opera house, a gala event that is one of Italy’s cultural highlights, is being canceled after a rash of coronavirus infections among musicians and chorus members.” The program was to have been a staging of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor starring Lisette Oropesa. – AP
Blog
How To Stay Creative During COVID Lockdown
The sameness and lack of novelty in our Covid existence can negatively impact our creativity — our ability to put ideas together in new, useful combinations to solve problems. Creativity is often enhanced when we’re exposed to new situations. – Harvard Business Review
What Exactly Is “Theory” In The Humanities (And Why Should We Care?)
The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. – The Millions
A Conversation On Editing-Driven Writing
“Commentary Magazine has, from the beginning, been an editor’s magazine. Very few pieces that Elliot Cohen edited, or that I edited, or that Neal edited, were not worked over, sometimes radically worked over. There are arguments about whether this is a good way or a bad way, but that’s the way it was at COMMENTARY. I don’t think any other magazine, except possibly the New Yorker, is as heavily edited as Commentary has always been.” – Commentary
The Guston Show Problem: Racist Images Versus Depicting Racists
The real tell is that in a statement he [Darren Walker] said that to mount the exhibition now would have been “tone deaf.” That’s the language of corporate image control. To many of the people who run our museums—not art people but bean counters—art is merely branding for the institution. – The Nation
Prominent Director At NY Gagosian Gallery Fired
A prominent figure within the New York art market, Sam Orlofsky had been one of the most visible leaders at Gagosian, where he recently helped launch a program known as its “Artist Spotlight” series, through which works by Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, and more were sold for large sums of money online. – ARTnet
Calculating The Value Of A Single Vote (Precisely)
“If you’re in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million. That’s a very small probability, but it’s big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it’s big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world.” – 80,000 Hours
The Traditional Japanese Theater Genre That’s Like ‘Rocky Horror’
“Stepping into a taishū engeki show is like being welcomed into a wild and flamboyant secret society. As performers in outlandish costumes dance on stage, delighted fans dance along in unison from their seats. Somehow, everyone knows the moves. Periodically, an excited fan will scurry up to the stage with an envelope or wrapped gift, or will jump into the aisles looking for more room to wave a glow-stick. This might sound like a crowd of teenagers at a pop concert, but many women in attendance are old enough to have teenage children of their own.” – Atlas Obscura
Bronx Cheer! Hall of Fame for Great Americans (Championed Here) Gets an NEH Chairman’s Grant
As an mild antidote to severe post-election anxiety, let’s savor a morsel of good news from the federal government: Although it falls short of what I’d hoped for, I’d like to think I may have had something to do with this announcement last week from the NEH. – Lee Rosenbaum
Scientists Are Applying Electricity To The Brain Again In Search Of Therapies
The breadth of mental processes and behaviours for which stimulation has been argued to have an effect is quite staggering, including creativity, appetite, multitasking, memory, mind wandering, attention, motoric processes, sensory processing and theory of mind, to name but a few. – Psyche