Data compiled by Doug Risner, a professor of dance at Wayne State University in Detroit, shows that only 32 percent of male dancers have fathers who support their desire to dance. Typically, American dads only want their sons to be athletic on the sports field. Adding music and ballet technique—or tap dancing, contemporary movement, ballroom or jazz steps—to physicality somehow makes that pursuit unforgivably girlish. – Dance Magazine
Tag: 06.11.19
Remembering Dr. John
Mac made every recording session, every gig, and every musical encounter better just by being there. He knew what to add. He knew what to subtract. He brought the best out of everyone in the room and did it with such casual grace and style that it seemed effortless. That same sense of ease pervaded his wardrobe. – Paris Review
Prize-winning Architects Pledge To Combat Climate Change
A whole host of Stirling Prize-winning architecture practices have declared an emergency in response to accelerating climate change. Calling for a “paradigm shift”, they unveiled 11 pledges to bring architectural practice in line with planetary limits and called on other UK designers to sign up. – dezeen
The Mysterious Case Of Agatha Christie’s 11-Day Disappearance
It was 1926. “On the evening of Dec. 4, Agatha Christie, carrying nothing but an attaché case, kissed her daughter good night and sped away from the home in England that she shared with her husband, Col. Archibald Christie.” She disappeared for a week-and-a-half, without explanation. – The New York Times
Does Owning A McMansion Make You Happier?
To be clear, having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby. “If I bought a house to feel like I’m ‘the king of my neighborhood,’ but a new king arises, it makes me feel very bad about my house.” – The Atlantic
The Bauhaus Was Built On Ambitious Ideas (That Both Succeeded And Failed)
This new vision for an art school was explicitly intended to combine knowledge of modern techniques for making things with a medieval attitude toward how and why you are making them. Gropius and his allies were going to save the modern world by shoving it as hard as they could both backward and forward at the same time. – The Easel
Why Medieval History(!) Has Become A Modern Battleground
Last week The New York Times reported in detail on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which is “capable of drawing users deeper into the platform by figuring out ‘adjacent relationships’ between videos that a human would never identify.” The Crusades are a plum example of a topic that turns into a thread, leading the viewer through a labyrinth towards potential radicalization. You can search “Knights Templar” on YouTube and reach conspiracy theories (“Ten Secret Societies Ruling The World”) within three intuitive clicks. – The New Republic
Allen Ginsberg Annotates Gay Pride March Photos
On the backs of pictures that photographer Hank O’Neal took of the marches in the 1970s, Ginsberg commented in Ginsbergian style. “Black white brown boy girl what idealism! — Wearing their hearts on a banner for nothing but love” – Hyperallergic
Worried About DeepFakes? How About CheapFakes?
Journalists, politicians, and others worry that the technological sophistication of artificial intelligence–generated deepfakes makes them dangerous to democracy because it renders evidence meaningless. But what panic over this deepfake phenomenon misses is that audiovisual content doesn’t have to be generated through artificial intelligence to be dangerous to society. “Cheapfakes” rely on free software that allows manipulation through easy conventional editing techniques like speeding, slowing, and cutting. – Slate
Where Did The Story Of Aladdin And The Magic Lamp Come From? Not ‘The 1,001 Nights’, It Turns Out
In fact, writes Michael Dirda, the tale came from one Antoine Galland, an early-18th-century Orientalist who was the first Westerner to translate the actual Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. He was working from a manuscript that had only 35 stories in it — and, when his translations became hits, he (not unlike Sheherazad herself) had to come up with more material to meet reader demand. – The Washington Post