Karen Brooks Hopkins, longtime president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM): “As fundraisers, we are constantly told to look at the bright side: If at first you don’t succeed; smile though your heart is breaking, etc. But as a former president and chief fundraiser for a large multidisciplinary arts organization, I have decided, in the spirit of the season, to present my ‘bottom 10 list’ delineating the worst, most excruciating parts of the job.”
Blog
Nine Top Architects Share Their Dream Projects to Improve (or Save) New York City
These dreams range from the very-much-doable (Norman Foster extending Madison Square Park) to the interesting-but-unlikely (requiring the new super-tall apartment towers to provide public space) to the good-but-too-expensive (elevated bike lanes) to the insane (damming and draining the East River and using the riverbed as farmland) to why-aren’t-we-doing-this-already? (a “cultural Airbnb” offering vacant storefronts for temporary use as performance or art venues).
Look At How The Met Opera Put Together It Big New Production Of ‘Tosca’
Sure, the casting may have been ill-starred, but backstage, in the “opera factory, … the company’s army of artists and artisans started work nearly a year before its opening night, on New Year’s Eve.” Photographer Todd Heisler and reporter Michael Cooper give us a look at what the troops have been whipping up.
Rose Marie, 94, Comic Actress And Singer Who Had 90-Year Career
She began working as a singer at age 3, had a national radio show at 5 (she went on a national vaudeville tour at 7 to prove she wasn’t really an adult), and had a decades-long television career that included three Emmy nominations for playing comedy writer Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show and nearly 20 years as a favorite on Hollywood Squares. She was doing voiceover work as late as this year, and a documentary about her came out just last month. (Fun fact: she says her father was an arsonist for Al Capone.)
America’s Smallest Museum Wants To Become Its Most Visited – And It Could Succeed
Scientist Amanda Schochet and designer Charles Philipp are the founders of MICRO, which creates six-foot-tall pop-up museum kiosks that can be installed in hotel lobbies, transit stations, office buildings – even DMVs and post offices.
The Latest Dance Series To Hit Netflix Is A World Tour Of Styles And Genres
Ashley Rivers talks to Vandana Hart about We Speak Dance, in which Hart travels from Bali to Vietnam to France to Nigeria to Lebanon to watch and meet with dancers – traditional and contemporary – and sees how the art form is used for everything from religious ceremony to political weapon.
Kennedy Center TV Broadcast Gets Its Lowest Ratings Ever
CBS’ broadcast of Kennedy Center Honors clocked its lowest ratings result in people-meter history, dating back to 1987. The Tuesday 9-11 PM broadcast fumbled 28% of last year’s 8.620 million total viewers, to 6.169 million. The demo dive: 30% from last year’s 1.0 rating to 0.7.
The Year We Fell Out Of Love With Algorithms
Algorithms that amplify fear and help foreign powers put a finger on the scale of democracy? These things sound dangerous! That’s a shift from just a few years ago, when “algorithm” primarily signified modernity and intelligence, thanks to the roaring success of tech companies such as Google—an enterprise founded upon an algorithm for ranking web pages.
Is The Met’s New Cancellation-Plagued “Tosca” Jinxed?
There have been plenty of star-crossed productions in Met history, including the premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” that opened the Met’s Lincoln Center home in 1966 (amid serious last-minute technical glitches and labor woes) and Robert Lepage’s recent “Ring” cycle (built around a 45-ton set that had a habit of breaking down). But Mr. Gelb said that he had never before had to recast all the leads in a new production. “Luckily, there are only three principal roles,” he said dryly.
How Big Data Is Transforming Social Research (And What’s To Come)
“I think the biggest change that is still to come is that much of the tracking and experimentation that we associate with online behavior will increasingly apply to our offline behavior. That is, right now, many researchers are aware that all our behavior online is tracked and subject to experimentation. For example, when you visit Amazon, they are recording and analyzing your browsing behavior, and they are running experiments to improve their business metrics. However, increasingly, more and more of these same things will happen with our off-line behavior because of so-called ubiquitous sensing and the internet of things.”