With the company due to open its autumn programme on 18 September, one of its principal dancers has publicly declared that the NYCB needs “a moral and fair individual to lead us out of this darkness”. Signs also seemed to be emerging that the NYCB may face a boycott over Ms Waterbury’s claims that her ex-boyfriend Chase Finlay, while a principal dancer at the company, shared nude photos of her and joked about abusing ballerinas
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Burning Man: Celebrating The Great Nothing
Routinely exposing a population of 80,000 to a perfect barren in relatively safe circumstances should be seen as an ingenious experiment. After all, philosophers from Edmund Burke to Arthur Schopenhauer have recognised that qualities in nature can be appreciated as sublime only if they fall just short of absolute threat.
Monday Recommendation: Emil Viklický, ‘Humoresque’
Emil Viklický, Humoresque (NCML)
Last spring, Czech pianist Emil Viklický traveled from Prague to visit relatives in the American Midwest. Never one to forgo a playing opportunity, while he was there he gave a concert at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Recent Listening In Brief: A Sextet And Three Duos
Rafal Sarnecki, Climbing Trees (Outside In Music)
Mikkel Ploug/Mark Turner, Faroe (Sunnyside)
Mark Turner/Ethan Iverson, Temporary Kings (ECM)
Hans Teuber & Jeff Johnson, Deuce (Origin)
Shakespeare And The Political Resistance
Two new books argue that Shakespeare wove oblique political critiques of the English establishment into his works, and that we can learn a thing or two from them in our own troubled times.
Why YouTube Stars Are Burning Out At A Fearsome Rate
Matt Lees began to feel a knock-on effect on his health. “Human brains really aren’t designed to be interacting with hundreds of people every day,” he says. “When you’ve got thousands of people giving you direct feedback on your work, you really get the sense that something in your mind just snaps. We just aren’t built to handle empathy and sympathy on that scale.”
The Women Who Are Busting Into The Samba Circle
With astonishing speed, female musicians in Brazil have in the past couple of years begun breaking into the male realm of samba circles, taking a seat at the table both literally and figuratively. Just a few years ago, the musicians playing in a samba circle jam session used to be almost all male. In 2018, though, a clutch of all-female samba groups have set out to change that, and in doing so, they have generated what could be a sea change for this beloved Brazilian musical genre.
Have Researchers Taught AI How To Recognize And Understand Language?
The most widely tested model, so far, is called Embeddings from Language Models, or ELMo. When it was released by the Allen Institute this spring, ELMo swiftly toppled previous bests on a variety of challenging tasks—like reading comprehension, where an AI answers SAT-style questions about a passage, and sentiment analysis. In a field where progress tends to be incremental, adding ELMo improved results by as much as 25 percent.
Your Reading Comprehension: Print Versus Screen Versus Audio
If you’re reading, it’s pretty easy to go back and find the point at which you zoned out. It’s not so easy if you’re listening to a recording. Especially if you’re grappling with a complicated text, the ability to quickly backtrack and re-examine the material may aid learning, and this is likely easier to do while reading than while listening.
Tate Outsources Bio Info To Wikipedia?
A Tate spokeswoman says that the gallery does “not have the resources to create biographies for every individual” in its collection, or to update biographies for living artists. Wikipedia provides “the most up to date and reliable biography possible within the constraints of our resources”, she adds.