The Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture, inaugurated last year as a sort of Nobel equivalent, goes this year to University of Cambridge professor Onora O’Neill, known for her work in international justice, human rights, and bioethics.
Blog
The Six Reasons Dance Training Makes You A Better Person
Steve Zee: “As a dance educator, I also take comfort in the fact that high-quality dance training helps shape students into genuinely good people. … These are the lessons dance teaches that help make students into better humans.”
Today’s Pop Music Charts: Completely Transformed (And Largely Without Women Artists)
“The spots on the Hot 100 that aren’t occupied by rappers, DJs, or Imagine Dragons largely belong to interchangeable young men playing R&B for campfires: Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber of course, but also Charlie Puth, Shawn Mendes, and the second wave of One Direction solo efforts—Liam Payne, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson. The pose they strike is of the nice-guy seducer, the suave but puppy-eyed everyboy. It’s true that Cardi B and Taylor Swift have broken through lately with brash, campy cries of war. But it remains to be seen whether their success remains an outlier in an era when pop’s women have often needed to quiet down in order to be heard at all.”
How Jazz And Classical Music Could Reconnect With An Audience
“Never in human history have people had easier access to music. As studies such as the 2016 Music Consumer Insider Report and Nielsen Music 360 Study of 2015 have revealed, a large portion (over 90%) of the U.S. population listens to music beyond 20 hours each week, and young people are especially engaged with music. While there is broad engagement with music, there are two musical genres which have increasingly moved to the periphery of ordinary life; the very two genres that I would argue have become unusually comfortable ignoring emotional connection between music performer and the general-public listener.”
UK National Theatre Introduces Glasses That Caption Performances For Deaf Audiences
The glasses will enable D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences to read live captioning on the lenses during a performance, removing the need for captioning screens in the auditorium. NT director Rufus Norris said the glasses mean that for the first time, D/deaf audiences will be able to attend any performance during a production’s run, rather then rely on the limited number of captioned performances – up to four per show – that are currently scheduled.
Research: Brainstorming Is Better If You Tell An Embarrassing Story
“Candor led to greater creativity. Thus, we propose a new rule for brainstorming sessions: Tell a self-deprecating story before you start. As uncomfortable as this may seem, especially among colleagues you would typically want to impress, the result will be a broader range of creative ideas, which will surely impress them even more.”
What Exactly Is ‘Cultural Memoir’? Margo Jefferson Explains
“For me, cultural memoir is a mutating definition. I first began to think in that way when I was working with the boundaries between criticism – literary, cultural, or whatever – which I had done for so many years, and memoir. I realised that I needed, in some way, to merge and to keep those two forms in dialogue, interrogating – as we like to say – each other. So, I began to think of cultural memoir. Initially I was just working obviously with non-fiction but, as you can see, fiction and theatre make their way in here, too.”
Report: Arts Organizations Are Experimenting Less With Digital
More arts organisations are using the internet and digital technology for revenue generation – such as by selling tickets online or accepting donations – and they are increasingly using technology to enhance audience engagement. But overall they are engaging in fewer ‘digital activities’.
J.G. Ballard, Prophet Of Climate Change?
“Consider the images coming out of South Florida” – let alone Puerto Rico – “the past few weeks: sailboats capsized and clotting on the shore; high-rises looking on, humiliated by their reflection in the flooded streets; palm carnage. These could easily be used to illustrate J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World.” Hunter Braithwaite makes the case.
What Hollywood Movie-Makers Are Learning From TV (And It’s Changing Movies)
These days, for many screenwriters, the studio system can feel like a small, small, small, small world. And Hollywood film writers — along with everyone else — have noticed a simultaneous boom in Peak TV. Which means that, for Hollywood screenwriters, even as studio slates shrink and become more attuned to event blockbusters, opportunity on the small screen abounds. “Premium cable and the entrance of Netflix and Amazon hastened this movement toward the idea that a TV series can be anything — and that kind of flexibility was unimaginable 15 years ago.”
