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What’s Happening To Airports? They’re Becoming Theme Park Fantasies

Changi in Singapore, which has long striven to enthral and entertain its users, outdid itself with its new “Jewel” extension to its existing terminals, essentially a shopping mall and nature-based theme park. From a great oculus in its glass roof descends the “rain vortex”, a funnel of falling water described as the “world’s tallest indoor waterfall”. It has a “butterfly garden”. It has the Shiseido Forest Valley, a 900-tree, 60,000-shrub indoor landscape named after the Japanese-based personal care company Shiseido. The forest concept is, in marketing terms, a good fit with its corporate mission: “Beauty innovations for a better world.” – The Guardian

The #ListenWider Challenge

Want to break out of your algorithmically-determined musical taste? How about being more intentional about what you listen to? Musicology Duck has set up a listening challenge for 2020 that prompts us to listen more outside our usual pathways. There are 30 challenges encouraging you to seek out music you wouldn’t normally encounter. – Musicology Duck

200 More Terracotta Warriors Found

The discovery, first announced by the country’s state-run news agency, came during a decade-long excavation of the first of four pits at the mausoleum, a 4,300-square-foot area where some 6,000 warriors were previously found. Archaeologists uncovered roughly 200 new warriors, 12 clay horses, and two chariots, as well as a number of bronze weapons, over the past 10 years. – Artnet

Is Walt Whitman The Writer We’ll Need In 2020?

“Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against ‘enemies of the people’; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. … Human beings are meaning-making creatures. A politics that is unable to translate its positions into some sort of transcendent language, pointing to something greater than the individual, is a politics that will ultimately fail. Whitman understood this.” – The New York Times

T.S. Eliot’s Love Letters To A Woman Not His Wife Are Being Made Public — And He Left A Bitchy Note To Posterity To Go With Them

The poet fell in love with Emily Hale in 1912, while he was a graduate student at Harvard. She did not reciprocate at the time, though they corresponded until 1956, when she announced that she would be donating his letters to her to Princeton, to be opened 50 years after both were dead (i.e., Jan. 2, 2020). Eliot was more than a little irked at Hale’s decision (he had her letters to him destroyed), but, since he couldn’t stop her, he left a statement of his own that “is also revelatory in its own way.” – Slate