Vancouver Symphony Appoints New Executive Director

Before joining the VSO, Angela Elster was senior vice-president of research and education at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, where she played a key role in opening the TELUS Centre for Performing Arts and Learning and founded the Learning Through the Arts program. At the VSO, she piloted the Day of Music celebration that welcomed over 14,000 people to 100 free performances, forged the Indigenous Council, and launched a new focus on health and wellness programming at the organization. – Georgia Straight

Gypsy Rose Lee’s Son Remembers Life On The Road With Mother

Erik Lee Preminger (his father was film director Otto Preminger) started traveling with his mother while still an infant, got his first jobs with her show before he was old enough to go to school, and was her dresser by the time he was a teenager. Of course he has stories — like the time when Gypsy was driving her first Rolls-Royce through Switzerland in winter and got stuck in the snow: “She tried to dig us out using a bidet she had stolen from a hotel. It was quite an adventure.” – American Theatre

The Very Controversial Start Of Asian-American Literature Studies

Students of Asian American literature have often been far more familiar with what is wrong with Aiiieeeee! than with Aiiieeeee! itself. From the earliest days of its publication, many Asian Americans did not hear themselves in the scream of Aiiieeeee!, did not see themselves in the “our” of its “fifty years of our whole voice.” They chafed against what they saw as the editorial limiting of “authentic” Asian Americanness to “Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese Americans, American born and raised.” This act of border drawing, by excluding Pacific Islander, Korean, and South Asian Americans (among others), further contributed to critics’ rejection of Aiiieeeee!’s brand of Asian American cultural nationalism as more divisive than unifying. – Paris Review

How The Franco Regime Ruined Zarzuela And Flamenco Music For Many Spaniards

“But as is the case with other musical genres indigenous to Spain, they initially developed with no ties to one political ideology over another. Zarzuela is nowadays perceived in the national imagination as an integral part of musical life under the Franco regime and, as such, outdated and conservative. … More than classical music and zarzuela, flamenco was perhaps the genre that suffered the most from Franco’s cultural policies.” – JSTOR Daily

What Did Happiness Used To Look Like?

We don’t know without a lot of careful analysis because words and their meanings change. However, “over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past.” – Aeon

Large Incan Idol That Pizarro Claimed He Destroyed Has Survived

“A basketball-player-size wooden idol that allegedly escaped destruction by the Spanish conquistadors is real — but it may not be quite what people suspected. The statue is even older than thought, and may have been worshipped by the people who came before the Inca. And belying the grisly lore that surrounds it, the so-called Pachacamac idol was painted with cinnabar, not drenched in blood, the researchers found.” – Live Science

Missouri Debates Jailing Librarians For Lending “Age-Inappropriate” Books

Under the parental oversight of public libraries bill, which has been proposed by Missouri Republican Ben Baker, panels of parents would be elected to evaluate whether books are appropriate for children. Public hearings would then be held by the boards to ask for suggestions of potentially inappropriate books, with public libraries that allow minors access to such titles to have their funding stripped. Librarians who refuse to comply could be fined and imprisoned for up to one year. – The Guardian

Want A Job? Increasingly You’ll Have To Get By The AI Algorithms First

With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance. – CNN