“Major radio stations are playing less music than ever before, according to playlist data now surfacing. And the reason is simple: fewer, more familiar songs keep more people listening more often, which means higher ratings and more advertising revenue.”
Tag: 02.14.14
Free Speech in India and the Problems With Wendy Doniger’s ‘The Hindus’
“Conservative Hindu groups have been campaigning against Doniger for more than a decade, contending that she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices, insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focusses … on sex. To her detractors, what look at first like impressive scholarly credentials … are, in fact, evidence of a sinister colonialist conspiracy dominating the study of Hinduism in the West.”
What Do You Get When You Cross a Bunch of Philosophers With The Daily Mail?
You get The Philosopher’s Mail, run by Alain de Botton (who else?), which “approaches celebrity news and global affairs as philosophically teachable moments. Paparazzi photographs of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are juxtaposed with quotes from Schopenhauer on the futility of love.”
We’re at The Dawn of a Brilliant New Age, Thanks to Artificial Intelligence
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: “The second machine age will be characterized by countless instances of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected brains working together to better understand and improve our world. It will make mockery out of all that came before.”
Trey McIntyre: I’m Proud That You Miss My Dance Company
“And that’s a great thing – to actually have something to mourn in this process, that makes me feel really proud that we achieved something great.” But he’s still going to leave us to mourn, while he gives up dance to make films.
Shades Of Christo! – A Plan To Wrap The World’s Tallest Building
The bizarre endeavor, called EXO-BURJ, would cover the entire building, from spire to ground level, in a “super-lightweight, reflective and semi-transparent fabric material.”
You Know What We Forget to Teach Music Students? Happiness
Holly Mulcahy: “One of the most important things being overlooked at music schools is practicing, maintaining, and cultivating happiness. Happiness is habitually pushed aside until an individual’s ideal goal or job has been achieved. With many musicians and artists I know, there is often an unspoken ‘law’ that individuals deprive or deny themselves of happiness until they have ‘made it’.”
Why Are “Artist Statements” So Awful?
The ubiquitous request “Please include an artist statement …” inspires cringes and groans among artists. An artist friend of mine called artist statements “the dentistry of the art world.”
New: Self-Published Books Are Now Outselling Traditional Publishers
“Indie authors are outselling the big five. That’s the entire big five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the ebook sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon,” writes Howey in his report, which has been described as “the most penetrating, ground-breaking, explosive article about publishing in memory.”
This Is How We’re Eating Our Creative Youths (It’s Not Pretty)
“As their ranks have swelled, interns are beginning to see themselves as part of a special class, albeit one with few privileges and perks. They share their own brand of gallows humor, their own pride of purpose and their own battle-hardened worldview tinged with a risk-taker’s optimism.”