“Every worldly example of continued personal identity involves tremendous transformations – whether it is developing language, sociality or morals; discovering a hidden passion; coming out of our closets; changing careers; falling in or out of love; growing or finding a family. Such dynamism does not throw our identities into question; instead, these changes represent some of the most significant aspects of our selves.”
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Report: Music Streaming Revenue Is Up 48 Percent In 2017
More than 30 million people are now paying for a subscription streaming service in the U.S., which pushed streaming revenue up 48 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first half of the year. Streaming now accounts for 62 percent of the U.S. music business.
How Trump Bought His Way Onto The NYT Bestseller List With “Art Of The Deal”
O’Donnell recounts buying 1,000 copies of The Art of the Deal to sell in the Plaza’s gift shop—only to be told by fellow executive Steve Hyde that it wasn’t nearly enough. “You’ve got to increase your order,” Hyde told him. “Donald will go nuts if you don’t order more books.” How many more? Four thousand copies, O’Donnell was told. “We were pressured to buy a lot of books,” O’Donnell tells the New Republic. So many, in fact, that he had to find creative ways to get rid of them all. “What we would do is use them as a turn-down service in a hotel,” O’Donnell laughs.
Mexico’s Museums Struggle To Figure Out Earthquake Damage
In a post on Facebook and Twitter, the Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia reported that all staff was safe. Other museums, monuments, and archaeological sites appear to have been affected by the earthquake, and many institutions and archaeology sites in Mexico City and the states of Hidalgo, Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala are currently closed as a safety measure.
Inside The Head Of A Guy Really Listening To John Cage’s 4’33” For The First Time
John Haskell has a very Cagean – or Beckettian, or Joycean – experience: “I was craning my ears, or pricking up my ears, or opening the metaphorical doors of hearing, and we don’t have a word for what the mind does, the way it turns from object to object, turning from the moment in front of it to another moment, to a past or a future, and having heard the subway sounds and the voices behind the wall, I expected to hear a candy wrapper being opened, the crinkling cellophane echoing through the audience like music, or ‘music,’ but there was no cellophane wrapper. But in thinking about the cellophane wrapper I was hearing the music, which was part of the let’s-make-art-out-of-anything spirit that was in the air in 1952, when Cage composed 4’33”.”
Trip Advisor Users Rank The World’s Most Popular Museums. The “House Of Terror”? Really?
“I would be the first to admit that many of the institutions here are new to me—though to be fair, I am not a military history buff, and therefore am unfamiliar with institutions like Hungary’s House of Terror or Singapore’s Battlebox, which seem quite popular. It’s not all just war, though: In Uruguay, the top museum is the Museo Andes 1972, an institution dedicated to the 1972 flight disaster that became the subject of the 1993 Ethan Hawke cannibalism drama, Alive. And it is truly endearing to know that Croatia’s favorite museum is the Museum of Broken Relationships, which began as a quirky art project.”
When Roald Dahl’s Publisher Decided He Was Too Much Of A Prick To Publish
Emily Temple recounts the time that Robert Gottlieb had finally had enough. (And “prick” is probably too mild a word.)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says These Seven Books Made Him Smarter
“Nadella, whose own first book, the memoir/vision for the future Hit Refresh, is being published in late September, says that he’s drawn particular inspiration from these seven works on history, economics, technology, and management strategy.”
Not Even Degenerate – The Miraculous Mondrian That’s Not A Mondrian At All
An untitled canvas that had been in the Nazis’ notorious “degenerate art” exhibition and thought lost seemingly turned up at a show in Brussels last year. No such luck. “What started out as a potentially major cultural discovery now turns out instead to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of presenting works of art owned by private collectors that have not been systematically vetted.”
Movie Musicals Came Into Their Own In The 1950s. But Fred Astaire Was On The Outside Looking In
Astaire’s fate in the early fifties was something one suspects he’d never accounted for: his age was beginning to show. Of course, this was a time when elderly men still courted young women on-screen with stunning regularity, and had Astaire been a normal romantic lead, this might not have been a problem. But he was a dancer.
