Just because you can Instagram something doesn’t make it a museum. “We go to museums to see our humanity reflected back at us; at the very least, what we expect when we visit one is a bit of cultural centering, some provocation, and intellectual inquiry.” – Eater
Blog
Chicago Lyric Opera’s Subscription Problem
The decline in subscribers is upending the already fragile economics of opera, changing how companies operate and what they program. Lyric now gives a quarter fewer main stage opera performances than it did two decades ago — it gave 60 last season — and has started presenting a musical each spring. – The New York Times
JS Bach, Master Recycler
When Bach’s heavy reliance on parody technique came to light in the nineteenth century, scholars found it embarrassing. It ran counter to the Beethovenian principle that composers must write new, highly original pieces, and the realization that several of the St. Thomas Cantor’s most-revered sacred works—the Christmas Oratorio and the Mass in B-Minor, in particular—were derived largely from secular tributes to earthly kings and queens was difficult to accept. In more recent times, scholars have moved beyond those prejudices and embraced Bach’s use of parody, devoting much study to the brilliant ways in which he carried it out. – New York Review of Books
Is Culture Just Bias In Job Interviews?
The most common method for evaluating a candidate’s potential is the unstructured job interview, which is a weak predictor of future job performance. The interview is especially used to assess culture fit. At worst, it boils down to a gut feeling of good chemistry or rapport that interviewers get from the candidate. At best, this results in well-meaning interviewers trying to ignore the very factors that cause that experience, such as charisma, attractiveness, and likability, as well as any attributes or background they share with the candidate. – Fast Company
A Writer Heads To The Woods To Escape Noise. Here’s What She Learned
A writer I admire once told me, “few people have an imagination when it comes to their lives.” I loved this. It flipped the notion that everyone was doing life right except for me — the common refrain of my consciousness — squarely on its head. The fact that I had abandoned my career at 35 for a pipe dream, didn’t have a partner, and was leaving the greatest city in the world to spend the summer writing in a cabin alone wasn’t wrong, it was imaginative. – Medium
A Venerable Christmas Day Tradition (According To Data): Chinese Food
The tradition has its roots in religion, of course, but also in immigration patterns. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish people were one of the largest non-Christian immigrant groups in the United States, as were Chinese people. That meant there were new populations that, by and large, didn’t see December 25th as a holiday. While most other shops and restaurants in U.S. cities closed their doors for a day, many Jewish and Chinese immigrants found something of a shared experience. – CityLab
Liverpool Crowdsources A New Logo Design. Designers Decry Exploitation
The authority shared the call for submissions on Twitter earlier this month, asking: “Do you have a passion for design and creative branding development? Can you create a simple but visually impactful logo that captures the spirit of an exciting cultural and creative programme?” But the message attracted more than a dozen critical responses, with several users seeing the competition as a request for design work at below market rates. – Arts Professional
How Do You Put Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ Onto A Stage In 2019? Interrogate It — Hard.
“Heart of Darkness is, to use today’s parlance, problematic. … Whether [the novel] is ‘offensive and totally deplorable’, as [Chinua] Achebe insisted, or a searing critique of colonialism trapped in its time, putting it on stage pulls it into the present. Literature might be excused, though not absolved, by context. Theatre isn’t.” Matt Trueman looks at the approaches two directors are taking with their adaptations. (And some of the commenters administer thoughtful interrogations of the projects’, and the article’s, premise.) — The Guardian
My New Best Friend Is A Computer – But How Does It Feel About Me?
Can computers actually think? Well, they are designed to perform functions that humans perform through thinking. They expertly process information, present it at appropriate points in a conversation, and use it to draw reasonable conclusions. But thinking in this sense can just be a kind of high-level functioning. It’s another question whether iPals’ calculations are accompanied by a subjective awareness of what they’re doing. – Commonweal
A Bit Of Stalinist Utopian Design, Now Available On AirB&B
A pair of architectural history buffs bought this 377-square-foot apartment in a 1932 Constructivist building in Moscow, restored it, and furnished it with copies of avant-garde Soviet furniture and design, including the famous Suprematist chair and table by Nikolai Suetin and upholstery from a design by artist Lyubov Popova. All yours for a mere $75 a night. — The Art Newspaper