China’s Hot New TV Series Breaks One Of Its Society’s Biggest Taboos — Dissing One’s Parents

Filial piety may be the paramount Confucian value, and flouting it is still rare in Chinese real life, let alone on state-controlled television. This is likely why All Is Well, broadcast only on a provincial channel, has been streamed online more than 390 million times, more than triple the number for the next most-popular show. – The Economist

Tchaikovsky – Experimentalist Avant Gardist?

The idea that Tchaikovsky anticipated the experimentalism of the Symbolists and Surrealists runs counter to his conservatism as a person and as an artist, his reverence for the music of eighteenth-century composers, reliance on the number format in his operas, general adherence to the diatonic system, and predilection for German augmented sixth chords. But he embraced these things in order to counter them, or to highlight and enhance them with his own unmistakable signature.  – Times Literary Supplement

Why Everyone Is Hating On Hudson Yards’ “Vessel” (Or Whatever We’re Calling It)

The Vessel has invited nearly universal vitriol, even amongst the politest architecture critics. It is an object lesson teaching us that, in our neoliberal age of surveillance capitalism—an era where the human spirit is subjected to a regime of means testing and digital disruption, and a cynical view of the city as an engine of real estate prevails—architecture, quite frankly, sucks. – The Baffler

What Happens To Sets From Movies? One Non-Profit Figured Out How To Get It To People Who Need It

Movie productions require lots of household items to fill their sets. But then the movie is over and where does all that stuff go? It’s a headache for the production team to get rid of it. A Massachusetts organization offers a service to quickly break down the sets and make them available to families in need, working with 400+ social workers. – WGBH

How Video Game Addiction Works

Many gamers seemed to struggle to find their place in society. “In our modern meritocratic society, you don’t have an obvious place in the way people used to have. You have to create it for yourself. That’s complicated. Fleeing into the more regulated world of the game—a Manichaean populist worldview—is an easy way out.” – The Atlantic

We Need To Talk About The Author Of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become a go-to feminist author with her clear, understandable, and terrifying short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” forgotten after her death but rediscovered in the 1970s. But she wrote a lot of nonfiction as well. In that writing, “she accused non-white immigrants of ‘diluting’ the racial purity of America and advocated for a government-run, slavery-adjacent system of forced labor, which she called ‘enlistment,’ for black Americans.” – LitHub