Ned Beauman, who writes conspiracy novels: “When we observe the Alt-Right questioning the established facts and the established world order, the last thing we should do is offer them a monopoly on that attitude. Nonetheless, if I had just written a novel that extolled, say, the spiritual joys of being alone with nature, and meanwhile enormous numbers of ill-prepared people were being found dead in the woods after succumbing to snakebites or dehydration, I might try to introduce some balance into my next paean to the wilderness.”
Category: AUDIENCE
270 Years After Bach, Fugues Are All Over YouTube
“The use of YouTube is no accident. The internet is a great way for fans to party contrapuntally. Online musicians have turned dozens of songs into fugues, from ‘Uptown Funk‘ to the ‘Star Wars‘ theme and ‘Old MacDonald‘.” (Even the fight songs of the two Super Bowl teams got fuguified.) “Others are making older pieces easier to understand. By adding scrolling videos to the music – each voice marked by different lines of colour – Stephen Malinowski lets fans follow the subject with their eyes as well as their ears.”
Why Dirty Words Carry So Much Effin’ Power On Stage
And they do – more, oddly, than on screen, let alone in real life. Peter Libbey looks at the reason profanity packs the punch it does (and when it doesn’t) – from The Mother****** with the Hat to Jerry Springer – The Opera, where even God curses.
If The Jobs Go Away, What Is The Future Of Leisure?
Properly conceived, leisure could be the ultimate social safety net for an era of technologically driven uncertainty. It is potentially a space for bootstrapping new “careers,” which may or may not adhere to the traditional forms of self-employment or wage labor. It is also a space where one can move beyond the career-as-identity paradigm altogether, and contribute to one’s community through cultural and civic activities that are ignored in economic models because they are unremunerated.
Netflix Says 70 Percent Of Its Viewers Watch On Old-Fashioned TVs
That number isn’t a shock — Netflix has been clear about the importance of TVs for a long time, and it’s why the company has spent a lot of energy working out integration deals with pay TV distributors like Comcast and Sky — but it’s a good reminder that not everything is moving to the phone.
How Fake News Spreads Online
For all categories of information — politics, entertainment, business and so on — we found that false stories spread significantly farther, faster and more broadly than did true ones. Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted, even when controlling for the age of the original tweeter’s account, its activity level, the number of its followers and followees, and whether Twitter had verified the account as genuine.
The Internet Has Failed Us As Public Space
Not long ago, the scientists and software developers who pioneered the World Wide Web thought it would democratize publishing and usher in a more open, educated and thoughtful chapter of history. But while the Internet and its offshoot technologies have improved society and daily life in many ways, they have been an unmitigated disaster for the way we communicate and learn.
Project Gutenberg Blocks All Users In Germany
The website, which makes literary works in the public domain available free of charge to users anywhere, was sued by a German publisher for offering books by Thomas Mann, whose works are out of copyright in the U.S. (where Gutenberg is based) but not in Germany. Late last week, a German court ruled in favor of the publisher, and Project Gutenberg made itself unavailable in the the Federal Republic.
The Underground Pop Music Industry Of Saudi Arabia, And The Bootleg Stores That Launched It
“At the end of 2017, US hip-hop star Nelly played a men-only concert in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; US country singer Toby Keith headlined a similar gig earlier in the year. These shows were flagged as landmark progress, in a strict Gulf state where music was apparently deemed ‘haram’. It’s certainly surreal to watch clips of Nelly pumping up a party where females are banned; in fact, pop culture has long reigned in this Kingdom – and its 1980s powerhouse was the Saudi bootleg cassette shop.”
Westminster Abbey Opens A Museum In A Space Closed To The Public For The Last 700 Years
The space was used for storage until, well, recently, when they took up the floorboards, only to find literally centuries worth of detritus – including many different centuries of stained glass blown in by bombs (or simple breakage).