Public Lectures Become Hot Tickets In Britain

Charlotte Higgins: “I’m not sure that five years ago one could have accurately predicted how popular the public lecture would become. You’d think: I gave up listening to people droning on at the front of the room when I left university.” Yet the talks are selling out all over, and in London, there’s even a School of Life which offers “sermons.”

Do Schools Still Need Libraries?

“Keeping traditional school libraries up to date is costly, with the constant need to acquire new books and to find space to store them. Yet for all that trouble, students roam the stacks less and less because they find it so much more efficient to work online.” A “Room for Debate” roundtable asks, “What are the educational consequences of having students read less on the printed page and more on the Web?”

Cut Off From Cuban Music, Americans Are Missing Out

“Cuban composers of both this century and the last tend to blur the boundaries of ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ and to assert Cuban identity through various traditional vocabularies. This melding and merging of genres is a theme, and a process that keeps Cuban musical life of all kinds infused with energy.” Not that Americans would know firsthand.