Kyle Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000.” – The New Yorker
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Fort Worth Opera Names New General Director, Its Third In Four Years
Afton Battle, a native Texan with degrees in voice from the University of Houston and Westminster Choir College, “previously worked in development and consulting for the Joffrey Ballet, New York Theatre Workshop, Red Clay Dance Company, the National Black Theatre, and the African American Policy Forum. [She] is also one of the founders of the recently announced Black Theatre Coalition, [which] has a mission to increase employment opportunities for black theater professionals and eliminate systemic racism in American theater. Battle’s commitment to diversity informs her plans for FWO.” – Fort Worth Star-Telegram
The Census Is Seriously Undercounting. How Artists Can Help
Artists, designers, filmmakers, and writers and the organizations that serve them have a unique power to craft and circulate art and stories that illustrate what is at stake — schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and more — and inspire people to respond. They can adapt quickly and touch people in our new digital reality. The census and organizers in the civic engagement space need them right now. – Hyperallergic
Could A Drive-In ‘Nutcracker’ Work This Christmas? This Company’s Trying It
“For five nights [Atlanta Ballet] will construct a pop-up drive-in movie theater on its surface parking lot, and will welcome patrons at $100 a carload ($150 for the front-row parking spaces). … The film will feature the new staging of The Nutcracker, with its outsize sets and startling video projections, introduced to Atlanta audiences in 2018 by artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin.” – Atlanta Journal Constitution
TikTok Asks Judge To Nullify Trump’s Threat Of A Ban
TikTok contends that Trump has exceeded his presidential power in ordering the ban, which it says amounts to impermissible regulation of users’ “personal communications” and was not “motivated by a genuine national security concern, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Lost Arts: What New York Would Have Had This Weekend If There Were No Pandemic
“We look at the toll the shutdown is taking through data (jobs vanished, revenues gone), visuals (picturing the season that isn’t) and personal stories (22 arts workers who should have been working this weekend, and what they’re doing instead). One weekend, lost, but also, so much more.” – The New York Times
We Thought Phone Calls Were Over. Then The Pandemic Came And People Rediscovered Talking
“Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year,” reported The New York Times back in April. “Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.” – Nautilus
‘Enormous Upsurge’ In Complaints Of Racist Behavior To UK Equity
“‘In a period of time [during the lockdown] when nothing was happening, we were receiving dozens of complaints from groups and artists, and we’re still receiving them now,’ said [union general secretary Paul] Fleming. ‘There has been a huge amount of dignity issues around hair and makeup through to reports of casual racism in dressing rooms and racist language in casting processes when people are at their most vulnerable.'” – The Guardian
How A Viral Video About Math Ignited A Philosophical Debate
Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real? – Smithsonian
Caravaggio As Therapy (Caravaggio?? Yes.)
Teju Cole: “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. … I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.” – The New York Times Magazine