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Disney Drops 20th Century Fox Brand Entirely

“Shedding the Fox name entirely from 20th Century Fox Television in the wake of the Disney-Fox merger, that studio will now be known as 20th Television. … Nixing ‘Fox’ from 20th TV was part of the negotiated merger terms between Disney and 21st Century Fox in order to prevent confusion among consumers. On the film side, 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight removed ‘Fox’ from their names in January.” – Variety

COVID Strikes Bolshoi And Mariinsky Ballets

According to reports on the Russian broadcast network RBC, one dancer at the Bolshoi (where rehearsals for the fall are underway) has gotten sick and 59 dancers and rehearsal pianists have been quarantined. At the Mariinsky, where opera performances are underway and the ballet Giselle opens on Aug. 13, “two or three” dancers are ill, classes and rehearsals are suspended, and company members who aren’t performing that day have been asked to stay out of the theater. – Gramilano (Milan)

How Data Fueled The Progressive Era

Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens. The emergence of statistical selves was not simply a rationalization of everyday life, a search for order (as Robert Wiebe taught a half century of historians to say).2 The reliance on statistical governance coincided with and complemented a pervasive revaluation of primal spontaneity and vitality, an effort to unleash hidden strength from an elusive inner self. The collectivization epitomized in the quantitative turn was historically compatible with radically individualist agendas for personal regeneration—what later generations would learn to call positive thinking. – Hedgehog Review

The Wellness Trap

Once we realize that we cannot find lasting happiness through relying on outer things, we might turn to meditation, but now a new problem can arise. Many people today are drawn to meditation practice for enhancing their own well-being: we would all like to achieve “inner happiness,” but again we are back to the search. The very attempt to seek a happy mind becomes endless, with chasing the happiness leading to more chasing. At the same time, our efforts to get rid of stress can seem to create even more stress. Meditation itself now becomes a new kind of hamster wheel upon which we endlessly run—running but not moving. – Lithub

Great – Time To Practice! But A Musician Gets Restless…

“Some days, I think this glut of time is an offering. More often, however, it’s a force-feeding. To have ideas, you need constraints, which for us were the auditions, rehearsals and performances dribbled across our calendars. Now that those boundaries have evaporated, I have begun to realize how much I depended on them and how much my relationship with music was predicated on feeling present with others, both in the audience and onstage. If a sonata falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?” – Washington Post