“There really aren’t enough chestnuts in the world to make this holiday season feel like reason to sing. And I’m here to say that it’s okay to not be okay.” Here’s a classical music critic’s ideas for what to listen to instead. – Washington Post
Blog
Could Museums (And Other Cultural Institutions) Better Use Their Investments For The Greater Good?
Through “negative screening,” institutions can exclude companies for potential investment that are not aligned with an institution’s values or show deficiencies in their environmental, social, and governance practices. Instead, the report suggests, they could opt to invest in businesses like ethical fashion or sustainable food, or even real estate projects that are affordable and target the creative economy, like artist studios. – Hyperallergic
AI-Created Art – A Dystopic Future?
“The glorious trajectory of Western European art, after sputtering to a pause with Pollock and Koons, would succumb entirely as does the world in “The Hollow Men,” “not with a bang, but with a whimper”—only the soft whirring of the computer hard drive will be audible.” – New Criterion
Pulling Apart A Critique Of Meritocracy
Some of the meritorious leaders out there were trade unionists, some Harvard professors. So what? And what’s the alternative? Rule by the meretricious, the stupid and the malevolent? – Literary Review
Against The Obscuring Orthodoxies
“Recently, I attended a panel at a dance studies conference. The buzzwords were so thick, and the presenter breezily buzzed through them at such a rapid pace, that I could not follow her argument. A second panelist presented her ethnographic study of a conservative popular-culture venue with such humor at her subjects’ expense—and commanded such regular laughter from the audience—that it was clear she counted on the near-complete homogeneity of the crowd. Had the sponsoring organization so successfully indoctrinated us with the party line that not a wisp of outrage, excepting my own, was stirred?” – The Massachusetts Review
Warner CEO Explains Why The Studio Blew Up The Movie Streaming Window
Hollywood thrives on hyperbole. But it would have been right to describe this move as unimaginable less than a year ago. While some moviegoers and studios have wanted for a long time to make it easier to see movies at home, the movie theater industry has hated that idea and has been able to prevent it from happening. – Vox
How Do They Reconstruct The Smell Of A Particular Time And Place?
That’s not an idle question, what with the Rijksmuseum running a project called “In Search of Lost Scents” that offers the odors of places from Amsterdam’s 17th-century stock exchange to the Battle of Waterloo to the Dutch locker room after a 1988 soccer championship, plus an endeavor called Odeuropa that aims to archive aromas from throughout European history. Here’s a look at just what some of those odors would be and how specialists reconstitute them. – The New York Times
UK Redefines The “Treasure Act” To Protect Found Artifacts
They are intended to ensure significant artefacts are not lost to the public and will instead be able to go on display in museums. The move follows the growth in popularity of metal detecting. – BBC
The Hidden Radio Stations All Over The FM Dial
“Subcarriers are, essentially, hangers on, areas of frequency that weren’t being used for the primary signal, but could find secondary uses in more specialized contexts.” Some FM subcarriers were used to provide a second channel for stereo, but “with secondary signals that may not be directly accessible at all by the primary receiver, completely unrelated, niche services were offered.” Those services have ranged from the original Muzak to specialized radio for doctors’ offices to services that read newspapers and books aloud for the blind to foreign-language broadcasts to GPS. (And there was one ill-fated Microsoft endeavor). – Tedium
Another Year Of Declines For UK Libraries
Annual figures from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) show that the number of books borrowed from libraries in the year to March 2020 – before the pandemic closed branches – fell by almost 9m year on year, to 166m. Public funding also fell by almost £20m, to £725m. In 2010, it had topped £1bn. – The Guardian