Tag: 01.01.18

How YouTube And Vimeo Have Transformed The Dance World

“Today, choreography once considered sacred and only transferred person-to-person is now self-taught, edited and remixed in bedrooms and basements, across the U.S. and beyond. No aspect of the dance industry, however commercial or ‘purely artistic,’ remains untouched by the explosion of video around the internet over the past decade. It’s made a profound impact on everything from how students learn to what audiences want, when choreographers succeed and which artists win support from donors, funders and presenters.”

Chinese Observer: Is America Going Through Its Own Cultural Revolution? (There Are Signs)

“Virtually all types of institutions, be it political, educational, or business, are exhausting their internal energy in dealing with contentious, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences in basic identities and values — what it means to be American. In such an environment, identity trumps reason, ideology overwhelms politics, and moral convictions replace intellectual discourse.”

Biographer And Estate Go To War Over Richard Avedon Bio

The feud has cast a pall over what was billed as an intimate and revelatory tell-all. Ms. Stevens drew on her own conversations with Avedon over the decades, and interviewed many of his prominent friends and collaborators, including Calvin Klein, David Remnick, Twyla Tharp, Donatella Versace, Jann Wenner and Isabella Rossellini. Some of Ms. Stevens’s revelations about Avedon’s personal life are so juicy that they leaked to the gossip pages in advance of the book’s release on Nov. 21.

How Physicists Think About Conciousness (It’s A Physical Thing)

“The physicist’s worldview usually contains some aspect of physicalism (asserting the only “real” things are physical things, governed by physical laws), reductionism (asserting all observable phenomena are explicable in terms of their microscopic parts), and positivism or operationalism (asserting that the only meaningful concepts are empirically testable). And in recent generations more than any others, it seems, this web of attitudes permeates the zeitgeist. It is our inheritance from the success of 20th-century physics. This inheritance alters the way we frame questions about the mind and consciousness.”

How Futurists In 1968 Envisioned 2018

“Much of [the book] Toward the Year 2018 might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from ‘Space’ to ‘Behavioral Technologies,’ it’s not hard to find wild misses. … But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark.”

Four Refrains About Classical Music That I Do Not Want To Hear In 2018

Music advocate and Kennedy Center trombonist Doug Rosenthal: “You didn’t ask for it, but here are things I’d love to never hear this upcoming year. Admittedly, I write this post wearing my Grumpy Pants. But I’m also donning my Optimism Cardigan. So join me for another list. Because hey, anything to distract you from that champagne headache, am I right?”

Some Airlines Are Eliminating Seatback Screens

“Formally called in-flight entertainment, the screens, and the preselected media on them, go a long way toward keeping passengers happy and distracted. The longer the flight, the more useful the seatback entertainment becomes. But those entertainment systems are expensive to install. They can cost $10,000 per seat … They also add bulk and weight to seats and quickly become technologically obsolete.” (Other airlines, however, are doubling down on them.)