“Six years ago, conversations about diversity and representation had yet to become the lingua franca, in part because Orange had yet to start them. People of color, LGBT people, immigrants, and the disabled are not a trend. These communities predate any single show, as does art representing them, as does the desire for more of said art. But Orange did more to thrust these issues into the popular consciousness than any single show before or since.” – The Ringer
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If Chicago Wants A Big Casino, It Needs To Learn From Vegas: Arts And Entertainment Make The Difference
Chris Jones: “At your typical large Las Vegas casino, gambling only accounts for 34 percent of revenue. The rest of the money comes from hotel rooms, fancy restaurants, cocktail bars and, of course, more live entertainment than any other city in the world. This month on the Strip where Lady Gaga roams, you can see Gwen Stefani, Jay Leno, Janet Jackson, Cedric the Entertainer and, of course, a suite of fabulous market-segmented shows created by the Cirque du Soleil, which is constantly renewing its offerings and paying attention to the needs of all demographics.” – Chicago Tribune
Can Las Vegas Finally Get A Proper Museum Of Art Open And Running?
“It would follow an era of hope that fizzled even as casinos hosted megawatt art collections from the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian to draw tourists to the Las Vegas Strip. … There’s funding in the state budget, a matching grant of downtown land and cash from the city, a search for an architect is underway … and a newly arrived, well-connected director is gearing up a fund-raising effort that will involve naming rights.” – ARTnews
Savannah Philharmonic Names New Music And Artistic Director, Its Second Ever
“[Keitaro] Harada will replace founding Artistic Director Peter Shannon, who resigned last year. Harada, who has signed a multi-year contract, is set to conduct the opening and closing concerts of the 2019-20 season as director designate and take over the full title and responsibilities … beginning with the 2020-21 season.” – Savannah Morning News
Author George Hodgman Dead At 60 In Apparent Suicide
“[He was] a well-regarded book and magazine editor who had his own moment as a literary cause célèbre in 2015 when he published Bettyville, a memoir about caring for his aging mother that also delved into his growing up gay in a Midwestern town.” – The New York Times
The ‘Scrubber Bar’ Changes Everything About Listening To Music
That line at the bottom of the screen of a digital music player that shows the length of the recording at the right and has a cursor showing how far along you are? That’s the scrubber bar. And you can use your mouse on that cursor to skip ahead or behind to any particular point in the recording. That gives a listener control over the time element of a piece of music — and, music being a time-based art form, this (though we may not realize it) completely changes a listener’s relationship to music. Brandon Lincoln Snyder digs into that change. – NewMusicBox
Trying To Get One’s Head Around The Idea Of Math As a “Beautiful Art”
That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong. – The Paris Review
Study: Immigrants Run Nearly Half Of American Fortune 500 Companies
According to a new study by New American Economy, immigrants and their children have founded 45% of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States, generating $6.1 trillion in annual revenue last year. While the organization is admittedly a pro-immigration group, the numbers are pretty convincing. – Fast Company
Observation Without Judgment: The Hidden Perils Of Machine Learning
Because most machine-learning models cannot offer reasons for their ongoing judgments, there is no way to tell when they’ve misfired if one doesn’t already have an independent judgment about the answers they provide. Misfires can be rare in a well-trained system. But they can also be triggered intentionally by someone who knows just what kind of data to feed into that system. – The New Yorker
In The 60s Publishing Consolidated And Became Big Business. Here’s How It Changed What Gets Published
“I built this model to investigate whether nonprofits are, as they claim, more literary than conglomerates. The results allow me to extend recent computational studies into literariness and answer yes.” – Public Books