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Could Peter Martins’s Departure Change How New York City Ballet Is Run?

George Balanchine set up a uniquely concentrated model of artistic leadership at his company: he choreographed, taught, coached roles, and controlled artistic policy. Peter Martins continued that model (even if he ultimately delegated choreographing duties after his own efforts fell flat). Now that Martins has resigned, Alastair Macaulay wonders if it’s time to change that model and split Martins’s job.

Costa Book Award Winners Include Poet Who Died Last June

Helen Dunmore’s collection Inside the Wave, which took the poetry prize, is about the diagnosis and treatment of the cancer that ended her life at age 64. Other category winners are Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (novel), Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (first novel), Rebecca Stott’s In the Days of Rain (biography), and Katherine Rundell’s The Explorer (children’s literature). Each category winner receives £5,000; the Costa Book of the Year prize, worth £30,000, will be revealed on January 30.

Violinist Robert Mann, 97, Founder Of Juilliard String Quartet

“Conceived in 1946, the Juilliard quartet gave its first official performance the next year. Besides Mr. Mann, the original roster included the second violinist Robert Koff, the violist Raphael Hillyer and the cellist Arthur Winograd. Mr. Mann – for decades the quartet’s de facto spokesman, institutional memory and ‘resident spark plug,’ as the Chicago Tribune called him in 1997 – remained with the ensemble for 51 years.”

How Physicists Think About Conciousness (It’s A Physical Thing)

“The physicist’s worldview usually contains some aspect of physicalism (asserting the only “real” things are physical things, governed by physical laws), reductionism (asserting all observable phenomena are explicable in terms of their microscopic parts), and positivism or operationalism (asserting that the only meaningful concepts are empirically testable). And in recent generations more than any others, it seems, this web of attitudes permeates the zeitgeist. It is our inheritance from the success of 20th-century physics. This inheritance alters the way we frame questions about the mind and consciousness.”

How I Failed My Exams And Learned To Love The Piano

“A few years ago, as a lover of jazz and an admirer of musicians, I decided to take up the piano. In relative terms, it was all a bit late. I didn’t expect much. I merely nursed the hope that one day, for a few fleeting seconds, I would be proficient enough to play a quiet sombre tune on a grand piano in a top-floor penthouse overlooking central Manhattan. As occurs in the best films. That aim seemed modest enough, But then I was told about the exams. You should do exams, came the advice, it focuses the mind. And suddenly the playing wasn’t the thing, it was the exams.”

What Happened To Intellectual Debate On Campuses?

“The real intellectual crisis on campus is not threats to free speech, but threats to the quality of speech. Like much of the media, colleges have capitulated to a Trumpian version of debate that treats lying, demagoguery, bluster, mockery, and bad faith as equally valid approaches to ideological argumentation. This approach subordinates the pursuit of truth to a pernicious “both sides” logic that treats all statements as equal simply because they’re politically divergent, even if they’re radically different in merit.”

Will Technology Reinvent The Book? Nope, And Here’s Why

“Yes, the written word has been in decline since the advent of film and then television, though recent technological change has undoubtedly hastened its fall. But this has led many to assume that the problem is one of form, that if the book could adapt to our multi-screen age, its cultural retreat would end. This optimistically assumes that the decline is reversible, which it isn’t. Books were overtaken by other media decades ago. The problem isn’t that books don’t have enough television in them, or enough internet in them; it’s that they are just one form of readily available cultural consumption among so many.”