Tag: 06.21.04

Would Playing Faster Increase Productivity?

Australia’s Adelaide Symphony Orchestra isn’t exactly a luxurious place to work. Its highest-paid musician is paid less than the lowest-paid member of the Sydney Symphony, and an organizational restructuring this year has cut costs and staff to the bone. And yet despite significant gains in ticket sales and private contributions, the ASO is still struggling with the deficits that have plagued Australia’s orchestras since they were privatized in 1997. Part of the problem may be that government assumptions concerning orchestras consistently expect that productivity can increase. But as one union leader points out, “it takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to rehearse and perform as it did 200 years ago.”

Should The CBC Be Privatized?

Canada’s next government might try to privatize the CBC. “The truth is, since the late ’70s, when independent production began in earnest thanks to taxpayer support, a huge business has grown up where once there was CBC and little else. The entertainment-media industry is not about to shrink in this wired world. Quite the opposite. So, rather than weeping and wailing about what was — or wasn’t — perhaps the wiser course is to look to the future and act as if there is one. Maybe the time has simply come to rewrite this script.”

Why The TV Schedule Had To Change

TV “networks have a lot to gain by switching away from traditional seasons, and viewers do, too, since new shows are easier to check out when they come in small doses. It’s impossible for a normal person who has any kind of life to see all the shows that début in the fall, and within a couple of weeks it can be too late, since shows not infrequently get cancelled after just two or three episodes. But something has happened to summer in the process. Reruns are disappearing from the landscape; soon you’ll no longer have the chance to see that episode of your favorite show which you missed because your tango class interfered, and you won’t happen to catch a show that you ignored during the regular season, and that turns out to be good.”

Welsh Built Stonehenge?

Archaeologists now believe that some of the builders of Stonehenge were Welsh. “The finding, which comes just before Sunday’s summer solstice, not only sheds light on Stonehenge’s origins, but also provides clues to prehistoric migration patterns within Europe following the Stone Age, which was the earliest known period in human culture.”

Correcting The Punctuation Book

“Eats, Shoots & Leaves” present itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off th suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.” So Louis Menand takes a blue pencil to the book and finds plenty to circle.