How The Coin Toss Became A Cultural Stand-In For Unbiased Outcomes

“Culture has taken the coin toss as an impartial way to select between two possible outcomes. It implies fairness—there isn’t anything that coin tossers can do (besides cheat) to favor one outcome. No agency appears to intervene in the decision, and thus the human actors committed to it can comfortably distance themselves from the result. Indeed, in popular culture, the coin toss has become a way to shed moral responsibility for an outcome.”

Turkish Soap Operas, And Their Women, Cause Controversy All Over The Muslim World

As the shows become ever more popular internationally, some women viewers see the female characters as empowered and inspiring – and those viewers become more willing to speak up for themselves. Others see the same shows as reinforcing traditional norms (women as caregivers dependent on men) and punish female characters who stray from those norms. And what do the men think? (Well, the photo at left is of a poster for one of these soap opera that’s been egged.)

How To Take (And Absorb) Corrections In Class Without Becoming A Self-Loathing Wreck (#AdviceForDancers)

“Class can be a whirlwind of information. Your teacher throws out multiple corrections at once – often in the middle of a combination – and as much as you want to apply them, they don’t always stick. Though some are notes you’ve heard time and time again, you get too overwhelmed trying to fix all of them to correctly incorporate any of them.”

What One Learns From Analyzing Ten Years Of NY Times ‘Modern Love’ Columns

“A typical ‘Modern Love’ column is no more representative of how the average person falls in love than Romeo and Juliet. … Still, the column can reveal a lot about our cultural attitudes toward romance and heartbreak. As graduate students in economics and computer science, we decided to use statistics to analyze every ‘Modern Love’ column published over the past 10 years – with the goal of identifying patterns in how romantic narratives take shape.”

The Ukrainian Dancer Who Has Become An Actor And A Star On (Of Course) ‘The Americans’

Irina Dvorovenko plays a Russian woman who finds herself depressed and lonely in the U.S. It’s a big difference from being a principal for American Ballet Theatre, but not so different from her youth: “Ms. Dvorovenko, born in 1973, grew up in Ukraine with dancer parents and studied gymnastics before entering ballet school at 10. For her, the show’s time period has brought back a flood of memories. Many have to do with hunting for food. (In the transcript of our interview, that word comes up 21 times.)”

Harvard Makes Big Changes In Its Music Studies Programs

We’ve always had gaps in our education, and I think it’s a little disingenuous to say, “Well, what about Schubert?” What about Tony Conrad? I teach the survey now, and I have never pretended to “cover” things. You don’t cover things when you do a survey, and I tell the students that: we’re going to talk about things that interest me – that’s one thing we’re going to do – and the other thing we’re going to do is learn some music that you might find interesting or appealing – or not. But coverage cannot be the goal, and was never the goal.

How Big Is The Online Art Market?

Despite a relative slowdown in the global art market, the online art market grew by 15 percent, to $3.75 billion, last year, according to Robert Read, head of art and private clients for Hiscox. The online art market’s share of the total art market also grew last year, from 7.4 percent in 2015 to 8.4 percent. While that may seem small, it is roughly equivalent to e-commerce sales’ share of the total retail market, which reached 8.3 percent last year, according to the U.S. census.