Photography has long played a crucial role in how we shape the narrative of our lives. Milestones are documented, creating an archive that can be looked back on for years to come. But the value of facilitated photographs—whether a carnival’s fake backdrop of Niagara Falls or giant stilettos at the Happy Place—are a bit more difficult to parse. The photos are blatantly staged and not attached to important life events. – The Walrus
Blog
University Suspends Professor For Reading James Baldwin Aloud In Class
Augsburg University in Minnesota suspended a professor for using the N-word during a class discussion about a James Baldwin book in which the word appeared — and for sharing essays on the history of the word with students who complained to him about it. – Inside Higher Ed
The Bluegrass Song About Atonal Music That’s Gone Viral On YouTube
“(Gimme some of that) Ol’ Atonal Music,” by the singer Merle Hazard, details in sunny and endearing tones a love of atonality, while explaining to newbies what that is (music that isn’t in one clear key), and includes the best atonal banjo solo you’ve ever heard (probably the only atonal banjo solo you’ve ever heard). That the solo, and the production values, are so good, is no surprise: The soloist and the recording’s producer is Alison Brown, one of the leading five-string banjo players in the country. Combine that with a crack backup band, Hazard’s sweetly earnest delivery and a John Cage spoof that’s actually funny, and you have a lot of people laughing at their desks. – Washington Post
Why Scientists Are Rethinking The Whole Idea Of Animal Consciousness
This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. – The Atlantic
Kahlo: It’s Fridalandia in Brooklyn
I enjoyed seeing the Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, but the exhibit was about her, not about her art. (That was its goal, and it succeeded at its goal.) The balance between her life and her art is, as ever, askew. — Judith H. Dobrzynski
Dancing Community
It wasn’t the usual impersonal voice reminding those of us sitting in the Joyce Theater to please turn off our cellphones, Instead, we who were waiting to see Camille A. Brown and Dancers perform her ink heard a muted, but excited babble and a voice that I took to be Brown’s. — Deborah Jowitt
Accessibility and its discontents
When I started blogging a decade and a half ago, I took for granted that it would be essential to draw a bright line between the things I talked about on line and the things I kept to myself. Many of my millennial friends, by contrast, seem not to draw that distinction. — Terry Teachout
A Two-Piano Encounter
A welcome surprise: I had no idea that veteran pianist Fred Hersch and the relatively new piano star Sullivan Fortner had worked together. — Doug Ramsey
Silicon Valley Tech Says It Wants To Save The World. The Reality May Be Quite Different
At some tech companies, faith in the mission is encouraged to the point that it resembles religious belief. Employees are invited to see themselves as proselytizers for the transformation of society, spreading the ideas of a company and its leaders around the world. What happens, though, when the mission doesn’t accord with the behavior of a company or the values of its employees? – The New Republic
You’re Not Wrong: Pop Music Today Sounds Different – How Science Killed Sonic Nuance
Our ears perceive loudness in an environment by reflexively noting the dynamic range — the difference between the softest and loudest sounds (in this case, the environment is the recording itself, not the room you are playing it in). A blaring television commercial may make us turn down the volume of our sets, but its sonic peaks are no higher than the regular programming preceding it. The commercial just hits those peaks more often. A radio station playing classical music may be broadcasting a signal with the same maximum strength as one playing hip-hop, but the classical station broadcast will hit that peak perhaps once every few minutes, while the hip-hop station’s signal may peak several times per second. – The New York Times