Heidi Reitmaier is moving on in January to become deputy director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she’ll also serve as chief of public programming and learning. – Toronto Star
Blog
UK Government’s Brexit Proposal For Creative Sector Is “Huge Disappointment”
“Proposals to maintain the salary threshold, as well as the failure to include any measures to address the challenges faced by freelances, are hugely disappointing. It demonstrates government’s blindness to the major strains that Brexit and the current immigration system will have on organisations’ ability to recruit the talent they need.” – The Stage
Please: Transgender Theatre That Isn’t Strange
“To many playwrights, the very existence of trans people is enough to make up an entire plot, because it’s just that strange. It often doesn’t end up mattering where we come from, who we love, what we think—to be trans is so new and bizarre that everything in the play must be dedicated to parsing that, with almost no attention given to the other important factors that make up our lives.” – Howlround
The Evil (?) Genius Behind Alvin And The Chipmunks
“In 1957, Ross Bagdasarian had an idea. … The story goes that [he] was down to his last $200 when he took a chance on purchasing a fancy tape recorder — one that could change the speed of the recording — for his songs. Playing around with the settings, he stumbled upon a technique that would change his life.” And, in a way, America’s. — Tedium
John Williams (Jazz Pianist) Has Died
The jazz pianist, not the Star Wars/Boston Pops guy.
— Doug Ramsey
Is There Any Wisdom In The Notion Of Wisdom Of The Crowd?
The “wisdom of crowds” refers to the result of a very specific process, where independent judgments are statistically combined (i.e., using the mean or the median) to achieve a final judgment with the greatest accuracy. In practice, however, people rarely follow strict statistical guidelines when combining their own estimates with those of other people; and additional factors often lead people to assess some judgments more positively than others. – Harvard Business Review
The Pros And Cons Of Ballet’s Ranking System
Most European companies have at least five ranks for their dancers, based on the system developed at the Paris Opera Ballet. Most North American companies limit themselves to corps de ballet, soloist, and principal; the Joffrey does without rankings altogether. And when Dutch National Ballet artistic director Ted Brandsen wanted to make his company’s seven-rank system more egalitarian, the dancers themselves objected. Joseph Carman looks at the advantages and disadvantages of dancer ranks. — Dance Magazine
The Opera Podcast You Didn’t Know You Needed
“It’s an elegantly constructed, effortlessly listenable series that does exactly what you’d hope a general-interest opera podcast would do. It also avoids most of what you’d hope it would avoid—pandering, dumbing down, trying to make opera seem hip. (It gets away with its silly name, just barely, by claiming to “decode” what makes arias great.) The show seems to understand that there are plenty of people who know a little bit about opera and might like to know more; to do that, it makes use of the Met’s archive and extensive community of artists and thinkers.” – The New Yorker
Ex-Banker Starts Up Investment Fund Based On Rare Old String Instruments
Frankfurt financier Christian Reister and violin dealer Jost Thoene have founded Violin Assets GmbH as a fund that treats Strads, Guarneris, Amatis, and the like as an “alternative asset class” — one that, Reister observes, can appreciate at the rate of 8% a year or more. — Bloomberg
What It Means To Disconnect From Facebook
Slate spoke with a small group of people who had publicly declared they planned to #DeleteFacebook. Most were successful, though some find themselves back on the site from time to time. Their stories demonstrate that reducing exposure to Facebook does not necessarily mean deleting an account, but that taking the extra step makes it easier to avoid falling back into the trap. – Slate