“[Rupi] Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet. … I’d argue that many of the writers currently being discussed as the most significant of the last decade write in direct opposition to the pervasive influence of the internet. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner (to name but three of our best) are interested in the single analog consciousness as a filter through which to see the world. If you think their experiment is the most important of the last 10 years, you’re probably (sorry) old.” – The New Republic
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Does All Music Have Something In Common?
‘Beach Blanket Babylon’, A San Francisco Institution, Brings Its 45-Year Run To A Close
Even as the topical revue heads toward its final performance on New Year’s Eve, it still gets tweaked to reflect current news. (Donald Trump’s angry tweet at Greta Thunberg — he said she needed to work on anger management — made it into the script in a matter of hours.) Jo Schuman Silver, widow of Babylon creator Steve Silver, has been producing the show on her own since his death in 1995, and she gets a profile here from reporter Tony Bravo. – San Francisco Chronicle
How Robert Moses Transformed The Metropolitan Museum
Wags had taken to calling the Met the Necropolitan and said it suffered from hardening of the galleries. The New Yorker sniped that the acting director still wrote with a quill pen and considered theories about the democracy of art to be “so much parlor Socialism.” Moses disdained the old families who’d run the place since its founding. – The Daily Beast
These Artisans Have Been Hand-Making Cymbals For 600 Years
Cymbals are now mainstays of marching bands, drum sets, and orchestral percussion batteries, but they originally came from Ottoman Janissary bands, and Istanbul can be considered their home city. A BBC crew visits a workshop where Turkish cymbalsmiths forge and hammer the instruments to order. (video) – BBC
Why Our New Year’s “Starting Over” Motivations Don’t Work
Results from six studies support this idea that focusing on the pursuit of a goal can be helpful in the long term. The researchers encouraged more than 1,600 people who had just achieved a personal goal to reflect on their recent success through the lens of either a “destination” or a “journey.” They found that those who thought about their goal as part of a journey were more likely to continue making progress towards it—even though they’d supposedly already achieved it. – Nautilus
Fifty Years Of The Community Museum Movement
“How should museums relate to their surroundings? What are the most meaningful ways for them to connect and work with their communities? … These questions date to the beginning of the community museum movement in the 1960s and remain foundational to the field.” Anna Diamond reports from a Smithsonian symposium on the subject. – Smithsonian Magazine
After Six Years, Broadcasters Of Syrian Exile Radio Station Marooned In Istanbul
Since 2013, Radio Alwan, which started as community radio in a Syria just breaking out in civil war, broadcast politically neutral news and other programming to Aleppo and Idlib on FM as well as online. The U.S. funding that supported the station has been withdrawn by the Trump administration, Radio Alwan is now off the air, and its staffers are stuck in a country that seems not to want them. – BBC
Why Doesn’t Ballet Training Teach Women To Dance Allegro The Way It Does Men?
“With technically demanding feats, male ballet training tends to emphasize jumps and batterie. In general, men are more privy to additional allegro combinations at the end of multi gender classes, as well as male-only technique classes. … And the women? Most female ballet dancers today perform both classical and contemporary repertoire interchangeably, and this can include exuberant jumps similar to traditional male variations.” So why aren’t they being taught the same way? – Dance Magazine
The New Yorker’s Top 30 Cultural Moments Of The 2010s
Troy Patterson’s choices range from Zadie Smith’s essay “Generation Why”?, through Matthew McConaughey’s nihilist scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, David Lynch’s art show, the Kylo Ren lightsaber toothbrush, Greg Tate’s MTV News lament for Prince, Lin-Manuel Miranda doing Alexander Hamilton on Drunk History, artist Cindy Sherman’s Instagram feed, and the La La Land/Moonlight Oscar night fiasco, to Patricia Lockwood’s essay “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (and 21 — sorry, twenty-one — more). – The New Yorker