Syria’s architectural legacy has been a well-known victim and propaganda tool of the civil war. Islamic State famously took pleasure in detonating the temples and tower-tombs of Palmyra, with the delicate paintings and sculptures that they contained, and making sure the world knew about it. – The Guardian
Blog
Diversity Diversion: Plumbing Museums’ “Pipeline” Problem in Hiring Minorities
While the persistent lag in hiring minorities is arguably a manifestation of museums’ systemic racism, it is also a “pipeline problem” — the relative scarcity of well-trained minority candidates. But if a museum official were to state this publicly, it would likely be dismissed as a cop-out. – Lee Rosenbaum
Are Orchestras “Better than Ever”? — What Not to Tell a Young Musician
“Orchestras are better than ever” – if you mean that, literally, you mean that in terms of the role the institution plays in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Boston, it has a bigger and more important role than it’s ever had in the past. Anybody who says that – they don’t know what an orchestra is. So this is a dangerous thing to tell young musicians. – Joseph Horowitz
Lang Lang, the Goldberg Variations and roads that were (long) not taken
Bach isn’t exactly the kind of composer for which Lang Lang became famous. In fact, he’s known the Goldbergs for a long time now, and the piece fits him better than you might expect. – David Patrick Stearns
What Next After Zoom Fatigue
Zoom fatigue is the feeling of utter hopelessness after your ninth video call of the day, and experts say it’s brought on because the technology overtaxes your brain. Presented with a cropped, often blurry image of a human and a few milliseconds of lag throughout the conversation, your mind splits its attention between what people are saying and what’s happening on the screen, longing for nonverbal cues that just don’t cross over. – Vox
Research: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive Working From Home
In sum, lockdown has been positive for knowledge worker productivity in the short term. But it has also created some concerns and challenges around longer-term effectiveness, creativity, and personal resilience. – Harvard Business Review
Discovery: US Teen Wrote 20,000 Wikipedia Entries In a Language They Don’t Speak
Alongside Gaelic, Scots is one of the indigenous languages of Scotland. The thousands of Wikipedia entries written in it make up one of the largest collections of the Scots language you can access online for free. The problem is an American teenager from North Carolina — who can’t speak the language — wrote 49 percent of all the entries. – Engadget
Why Americans Are Such Terrible Writers
If your children are in secondary school and are not writing essays, they are being swindled of their chance to do well in college. If you are a college student who is rarely required to submit a paper, you are being cheated of your chance to do well in life. – Intellectual Takeout
Educationist Sir Kenneth Robinson, 70
He told the audience at TED in 2006: “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new concept of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity. We have to rethink the fundamental principles in which we are educating our children.” Understandably, this was much more enticing to the education profession than it was to government ministers, but it was based not on a single speech but Robinson’s whole career in academic education, which culminated in a professorship at Warwick University (1989-2001), before he became a senior adviser to the J Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles. – The Guardian
The Racial Anxiety Behind Music Reaction Videos
Sure, they’re joyful, but … “the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air.” – The New York Times