The current level of global urbanization is high: It estimates the world to be 84 percent urban already. The EC research team, led by Lewis Dijkstra, used satellite images to assess the share of the world’s population that is urban. While traditional estimates from the United Nations and elsewhere find Asia to be 50 percent urban, the EC team’s analysis of satellite images finds it to be 90 percent; while the UN estimates Africa’s urban population at 40 percent, the EC research team finds it to be 80 percent. – CityLab
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Can You Be A Successful Artist Without Being On Instagram?
If an artist is supposed to propose new ways of seeing and creating, it’s worrying when social media platforms feel like they’re turning us all into sycophantic clones. – New York Magazine
Movie Special Effects Are So Astonishing We’re Bored. So What’s Next?
How have we gotten to the point where we somehow feel like we’ve seen it all before, even as movies desperately keep trying to show us things that we’ve never seen before? – New York Magazine
Kristin Korb Christmas
Kristin Korb, That Time Of Year (Storyville)
Winter holiday albums began showing up in the Rifftides mailbox well before Thanksgiving. They’re still coming. It’s time to call some of them to your attention. — Doug Ramsey
Does Becoming A More Expert Reader Increase Pleasure Of Reading?
Does one kind of literature afford a more refined pleasure than another kind? Can we compare the pleasure induced by Virginia Woolf with, say, that induced by Agatha Christie? Is “Casey at the Bat” potentially less (more) enjoyable than Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”? Is the pleasure of reading Henry James similar to that of reading George Eliot? At what point does a story’s eloquence or lack of it begin to affect people in the same way? – American Scholar
Making Art: Bacchanal Or Fierce Discipline?
The process of giving artistic birth is said to court a kind of violence that the maker must reckon with. Recent books have wondered about the tension between varieties of addiction and creativity, often by writers who themselves had been alcoholics, booze being a way to blunt or redirect the violence of making. – The New York Times
A Trillion Photos – How You Gonna Organize Your Personal History?
Kodak once touted 2000 as a landmark year, when the number of photos taken worldwide first eclipsed 80 billion. Fast forward to 2017, when just about everyone has a cellphone camera in their back pocket, and that figure jumped to a staggering 1.2 trillion digital photos. – The Atlantic
Can A Rapper Own A Dance Move Built Into A Video Game?
This case touches on more than potential damages or royalties for 2 Milly. It goes to how our brains process meaning. What is the smallest bit of information that tags a person? What fragment of our motor vocabulary — a walk, a hair flip — equals identity? What sliver of movement, what gesture of the hand, or even, what gesture plus time and circumstance? – Washington Post
Why Our Meritocracy Has Failed Us
“First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.” – The New York Times
French Cultural Venues Close As Protest Riots Grow
The Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées was graffitied by rioters; TV footage showed its interior ransacked and a smashed statue of Marianne, symbol of the French republic. French President Emmanuel Macron visited the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday, after returning from a trip to Argentina the day before, in order to inspect the damage. – The Art Newspaper