Blog

It’s Cold In Minnesota. Dogs (And Their Humans) Need A Place To Walk. Enter The Shopping Mall

“That first weekend there were probably 300 dogs. The area has a huge dog community, and it spread like wildfire.” With stores closed and escalators stopped, the two-story shopping center quickly teemed with dogs and their people, flowing along the perimeter of the mall like the classic image of early-morning mall walkers. What was intended to be a once-a-month winter event turned into a year-round weekly walking bonanza, save for the holiday season, when dog-walking was paused for a few weeks to accommodate extended shopping hours. – CityLab

Why Do We Need A Festival Of Music By Women?

“The statistics offer an eloquent answer. In the 2014-2015 season, only 1.8 percent of the music performed by the top 22 American orchestras was by women, according to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. For the coming season of 2019-2020, the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York has surveyed 40 American orchestras and seen a slightly better number of 6.5 percent — perhaps reflecting a degree of consciousness-raising in the past few years, as well as a larger pool of orchestras. Orchestras, obviously, are only one part of the classical music world, but these statistics reflect an ongoing underrepresentation of women in the field that increasingly, but slowly, some are trying to correct.” – Washington Post

Behind Steven Spielberg’s Campaign To Exclude Netflix

The studio complaints about Netflix break down into a few simple categories. The first is that they spent way more money on Oscars marketing this year than anybody else—reported numbers range as high as $50 million, although even the more conservative $25 million would be five times what Universal spent for Green Book. And second, there’s the whole “they don’t run their films in theaters unless we make them” thing. – AV Club

The Dutchman Who Discovered Two Rembrandts

“Jan Six is a 40-year-old Dutch art dealer based in Amsterdam, who attracted worldwide attention last year with the news that he had unearthed a previously unknown painting by Rembrandt, the most revered of Dutch masters — the first unknown Rembrandt to come to light in 42 years. The find didn’t come about from scouring remote churches or picking through the attics of European country houses, but rather, as Six described it to me last May, while he was going through his mail.” – New York Times Magazine

Meet Dr. Legato, The Bay Area’s Preeminent Sax Player

As one fan puts it, he’s the “ghost of Lester Young.” The irony is that he’s not that well known outside the jazz world. Nevertheless, he has hundreds of fans in social media, particularly on YouTube. He’s the saxman’s saxman, particularly for aficionados of Bebop. Moreover, he’s playing somewhere most nights; at the Seahorse in Sausalito; in the city, at Bird and Beckett in Glen Park, or the Deluxe in the Haight; or the Backroom in Berkeley, or the Sound Room in Oakland.