Author: Matthew Westphal

How Do They Reconstruct The Smell Of A Particular Time And Place?

That’s not an idle question, what with the Rijksmuseum running a project called “In Search of Lost Scents” that offers the odors of places from Amsterdam’s 17th-century stock exchange to the Battle of Waterloo to the Dutch locker room after a 1988 soccer championship, plus an endeavor called Odeuropa that aims to archive aromas from throughout European history. Here’s a look at just what some of those odors would be and how specialists reconstitute them. – The New York Times

The Hidden Radio Stations All Over The FM Dial

“Subcarriers are, essentially, hangers on, areas of frequency that weren’t being used for the primary signal, but could find secondary uses in more specialized contexts.” Some FM subcarriers were used to provide a second channel for stereo, but “with secondary signals that may not be directly accessible at all by the primary receiver, completely unrelated, niche services were offered.” Those services have ranged from the original Muzak to specialized radio for doctors’ offices to services that read newspapers and books aloud for the blind to foreign-language broadcasts to GPS. (And there was one ill-fated Microsoft endeavor). – Tedium

Building, Gradually, The National Ballet Of India

With the country having at least half a dozen thriving classical dance forms of its own, European-style ballet never caught on in a big way in India. Yet Yana Lewis, a veteran ballerina and teacher from England who settled in India in 1998, founded and runs the Lewis Foundation of Classical Ballet in Bangalore, where she’s training dancers and, crucially, dance instructors who can understand and respect Indian social mores in a way that most foreign ballet masters don’t. – The New Indian Express

Louis Andriessen Has Dementia And Has Written His Last Music

The 81-year-old composer suffered a fall last year; this past January, his condition having worsened, he was diagnosed with a combination of Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia and has moved into a long-term care facility. That means that May, a cantata written for Cappella Amsterdam and the Orchestra of the 18th Century that has its world premiere on Saturday (Dec. 5) at the Concertgebouw, is almost certainly his final work. Journalist Guido van Oorschot interviews Andriessen’s wife and his assistant and orchestrator for May about how the score came together and the composer’s state of health. – de Volkskrant (in Dutch)

The Great Library That Was Completely Destroyed Twice In 26 Years

By the early 20th century, the Catholic University of Leuven/Louvain in Belgium had one of Europe’s great libraries, with 300,000 volumes in total, including rare manuscripts from medieval Europe and the Near East as well as early printed volumes. What’s more, it was open to the general public. Then, in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm’s army marched through and burned the place down, an action which drew worldwide condemnation. An international effort after World War I rebuilt the collection — and then, in 1940, Hitler’s army blew the place up. Richard Ovenden, director of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, recounts the sad history. – Literary Hub

Why The NY Times Didn’t Include Meryl Streep On Its ’25 Greatest Actors Of The 21st Century’ List

“Late last month, after the list published online, [Manohla] Dargis and [A.O.] Scott discussed notable disagreements, that Meryl Streep exclusion” (had it been a list of 20th-century actors, she’d have been there) “and the importance of representing performances from around the globe.” – The New York Times