“Sidewalk Labs promises to embed all sorts of sensors everywhere possible, sucking up a constant stream of information about traffic flow, noise levels, air quality, energy usage, travel patterns, and waste output. Cameras will help the company nail down the more intangible: Are people enjoying this public furniture arrangement in that green space? Are residents using the popup clinic when flu season strikes? Is that corner the optimal spot for a grocery store? Are its shopper locals or people coming in from outside the neighborhood?”
Blog
Toronto’s Museum Of Contemporary Art Gets A New CEO After A Year Of Trouble
Heidi Reitmaeir’s appointment marks the end of a long fallow period for the institution, which, after closing its doors in its previous Queen Street West location in 2015, has endured construction delays and high-profile changes in leadership along its path to reinvention.
Art Galleries Move Into An LA Neighborhood And Residents Protest Gentrification (But It Isn’t Quite So Cut-And-Dried)
When a number of largely white-owned art galleries started opening here over the past few years, a familiar narrative began to emerge: new businesses and more affluent tenants moved in, followed by rent rises that forced out longtime residents. But while many young activists in Boyle Heights have loudly and aggressively protested the art galleries, Guadalupe Rosales – a successful artist and Boyle Heights native committed to preserving the history of her neighbourhood – doesn’t find the issues around gentrification to be quite so cut and dry.
I Made My Students Surrender Their Cellphones In Class. This Is What Happened
“Initially, 37 per cent of my 30 students – undergraduates at Boston University – were angry or annoyed about this experiment. While my previous policy leveraged public humiliation, it didn’t dictate what they did with their phones in class. For some, putting their phones into cases seemed akin to caging a pet, a clear denial of freedom. Yet by the end of the semester, only 14 per cent felt negatively about the pouches; 11 per cent were ‘pleasantly surprised’; 7 per cent were ‘relieved’; and 21 per cent felt ‘fine’ about them.”
Kirkus Changes A Book Review And A Storm Of Questions Erupts
Would Kirkus’s reviewer have changed her mind independently, even if the review hadn’t been pulled for evaluation? Or did she feel pressured to alter what had proven to be a deeply unpopular opinion when asked if she wanted to, even without explicit instructions to do so? What is clear, though, is that the choice to un-star American Heart reflects something noteworthy about Kirkus’sframework for critique — one in which a book’s value is determined not just by the quality of its storytelling, but also by its politics.
Jean Nouvel Talks About His New Abu Dhabi Louvre
The building is a giant dome that lets some light through. When tests were carried out in Stuttgart, Germany, and on a scale mock-up in Abu Dhabi, Nouvel found that even the 5 per cent of sunlight he intended to allow through was too much. In the finished museum, “Only 1.8 per cent of light goes through all layers of the dome,” Hala Wardé says. “We reduced the light to achieve the effect and level of comfort we were seeking.”
LeVar Burton Wins The Right To Use “Reading Rainbow” Tagline
You may remember the news in early August of a strongly worded lawsuitfiled by WNED, the PBS affiliate in Buffalo, New York, that owns the Reading Rainbow brand, against Burton and his digital reading company RRKidz (recently renamed LeVar Burton Kids), for “theft and extortion” regarding a series of alleged trademark violations — including promoting his podcast as “a Reading Rainbow for adults” and his repeated use of a catchphrase he used on-air for over 20 years but didn’t technically own.
How Would You Explain Opera? Here’s One Attempt
One would think that in an era of immersive realities, opera would have tried to aim for higher levels of verisimilitude, would have become grittier and true to life, but in the age of cinema, the opposite happened. Twentieth-century opera became more amorphous, less plot-driven. Watch something like Nixon In China, with its listless, meandering scenes and droning, repetitive music, and you will start yearning for a king disguised as a peasant and a letter given to the wrong princess. Opera does not attempt real social commentary or naturalism well: it is a heightened reality, a dream. Opera is crazy and intense like dreaming, another heightened reality, and we often wake from dreams wishing we could enter them again.
The Loneliness Of Elizabeth Bishop
“In 1974, Elizabeth Bishop seemed to have all the things a poet could want: a teaching position at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a first-look contract with The New Yorker, which almost always decided to publish her work. And yet she was inconsolably unhappy. ‘When you write my epitaph,’ Bishop said to the poet Robert Lowell, ‘you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.'”
What It’s Like To Spend Two Years In ‘Hamilton’
“Thayne Jasperson, who plays the British loyalist Samuel Seabury, is the only cast member still in his original role. Emmy Raver-Lampman, by contrast, started as part of the ensemble on Broadway, left the show in April 2016 for SpongeBob SquarePants, returned as an ensemble member in the Chicago production of Hamilton, and is now playing Angelica Schuyler in the first national tour. She and Jasperson talked to TheaterMania about their experiences with the musical and how it’s changed since the summer of 2015.”