“It can’t be overlooked that San Francisco has some heavyweight car-free peers. Once, pedestrianized urban cores were largely the domain of enlightened mid-sized cities in northern Europe. But now Paris and Barcelona have expanded the concept, and Toronto is mulling a car blockade for multiple downtown corridors. London charges a pricy fee for vehicles entering its busy streets, and New York City will follow with its own congestion pricing scheme in 2021.” – CityLab
Blog
Orange County’s Segerstrom Center Gets A New Leader
He’s Casy Reitz, currently executive director of New York’s Second Stage. “Before taking the position at the Second Stage Theater in September of 2010, Reitz was director of development at the Public Theater and director of individual giving at Manhattan Theatre Club. He holds a master’s in fine arts in theater management from Yale School of Drama and an undergraduate degree in theater from the University of Alabama.” – Voice of OC
Reading As An Active Sport (No Really)
“The main contention of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books – that reading print can be a sociable, active, and even seditious activity – is so sensible that it seems incredible that this long-form, evidence-based case hasn’t been made before. Why does it matter? Perhaps not only because we should think about whether our fantasies about the printed word are true, but also because we should ask why these particular fantasies have become so dominant.” – Times Literary Supplement
Humans Say: Music is Not An Algorithm
“The current streaming culture we find ourselves in marks music and wide open spaces of exploration into nothing more than a commodity, and because of this, we’re increasingly driven away from music’s way of connecting us all, that deep resonating force that helps us experience and process the weird wonder that is life.” I Care If You Listen
Studies: Acting Changes Actors’ Brains
“Until recently, this debate over whether actors literally lose themselves in their roles was largely a matter of conjecture. However, a pair of research papers in psychology published this year has provided some concrete evidence, and results suggest that actors’ sense of self is changed profoundly by their characters.” – Aeon
Confronting the MoMA Monster: How Its Rehang Lynches the Collection
How do I not love the Museum of Modern Art’s reinstallation of its permanent collection in it expanded, renovated galleries? Let me count the ways. – Lee Rosenbaum
Solomon Volkov on Stalin and Shostakovich
On Stalin: “People underestimate the level of control that Stalin maintained. I once tried to count the number of people in the arts that Stalin controlled personally – it was close to one thousand. This was Stalin’s habit.”
On Shostakovich: “I wouldn’t dare to record him [in an interview]. He was mortally afraid of a microphone.” – Joseph Horowitz
Recent Listening: “New” Ones By Anne Phillips And Roger Kellaway
Until recently, it may have seemed that the singer and songwriter Anne Phillips had resigned as a performer. She had not. Coincidentally, one of her colleagues on her most recent album, pianist Roger Kellaway, has a new disc of his own. – Doug Ramsey
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (5)
After watching Leonard Bernstein’s “Bach Transmogrified” Young People’s Concert (back when I was a young person), I went to Smalltown USA’s local music store the very next day hoping to find a recording of one miraculous piece. I did, and I’ve been listening to it ever since. – Terry Teachout
A Star Architect Who Recycles And Rebuilds For Those In Need
Shigeru Ban, a designer of houses and visitors’ centers and condominiums and towers, is perhaps more famous as a designer of emergency shelters, for people suffering from earthquakes and floods, for people escaping violence and genocide. For them, he has employed a signature material — recycled paper tubes of variable length and thickness. – The New York Times