Among the thousands of wax cylinders in the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology are songs and spoken-word recordings in 78 indigenous languages of California. Some of these languages, recorded between 1900 and 1938, no longer have living speakers. The history on the cylinders is difficult to hear. The objects have deteriorated over the decades, mold eating away at their forms, cracks breaking through the sound.
Tag: 10.11.17
The Best Optical Illusions Of 2017
The prize-winning images, chosen by readers of Scientific American, play with our perceptions of shape, motion, and length. Neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde talks with the three winners about how their illusions work.
What Is The Science Behind How We Experience Architecture?
Paul Goldberger: “If, until now, we – architects, critics, building dwellers – have had to guess what makes certain places attractive or comfortable or exciting or awe-inspiring, we now have some scientific basis for our reactions: what [Sarah Williams] Goldhagen calls a new paradigm, which ‘holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do.'”
Another Brazilian Arts Institution Attacked By Right-Wingers For ‘Pedophilia’
Last month, the country’s first major show of queer art was shut down in Pôrto Alegre after conservative groups began protesting, claiming that the art endorsed blasphemy and pedophilia. A couple weeks later, the same groups loudly objected to dancer Wagner Schwartz’s La Bête – in which he lies on the floor naked and invites audience members to manipulate his body – after a woman brought her five-year-old daughter to participate and video of the incident went viral.
The Banjo Player (And ‘Genius’ Award-Winner) Writing What’s Touted As The Next ‘Hamilton’
Rhiannon Giddens, who was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, is writing a musical based on a series of events in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, and centering it around the music of the time. She says, “for me, the heart of American music is in this moment of white and black sort of coming together. Maybe that’s simplistic, but to me it is a symbol of the best of what we do culturally.”
In The 19th Century American Higher Education Was Something Of A Shambles. How Did It Then Get So Great?
“By the second half of the 20th century, it had assumed a dominant position in the world market in higher education. Compared with peer institutions in other countries, it came to accumulate greater wealth, produce more scholarship, win more Nobel prizes, and attract a larger proportion of talented students and faculty. US universities dominate global rankings. How did this remarkable transformation come about?”
Scorsese Is Wrong: Rotten Tomatoes Isn’t Ruining Movies, And Film Criticism Is ‘Better Than Ever’
Richard Brody, responding to the great director’s dyspeptic guest column in The Hollywood Reporter, argues that the Internet has made criticism more democratic and often better-informed, that the aggregated critical scores on Rotten Tomatoes really do help identify good new films, the best of which rival anything from Scorsese’s heyday, and that Scorsese’s unhappiness arises from a major generational shift.
Study: How You Read Affects How Much You Remember
“One study revealed that people think they are better at comprehending information when they read it on a digital screen. This resulted in those readers reading the text much faster than those reading the text in paper format. Yet despite spending less time reading the text, the digital readers predicted they would perform better on a quiz about the text than the people who read the text on paper. Yet when the digital and paper groups were tested, the paper groups outperformed the digital groups on memory recall and comprehension of the text. They also were closer to their test result predictions than the digital group was.”
Eight Ways Non-Profits Talk About Exploiting Workers
“The nature of nonprofit exploitation is revealed in the language we use uncritically. I’ve ranked eight common nonprofit phrases from least to most exploitative.”
The 10 Best Places In DC To Sit And Really Enjoy Art
“Sitting down, in a museum, can be an almost radical act: a refusal to flow along with the distracted crowd, idly passing by art as if it was just one more stream of visual enticement in a visually saturated world. A good sit is all about committing to the depth, not the breadth, of the art itself, seeing more by deciding to see less.” Philip Kennicott picks the finest spots in greater Washington to do just that.