They Say Blockchain Is Going To Revolutionize The Publishing Business. Is This Just Hype?

Perhaps not since the advent of the internet itself has a single technology buzzword captured the imagination of so many. Book publishing is no exception: a growing number of startup companies, people in existing companies, and investors are touting the promise of blockchain technology for publishing. Meanwhile, skeptics say that blockchain cannot possibly live up to all the hype. – Publishers Weekly

Two Chicago Ensembles Make A Mission Of Programming Female Composers

Oboist Ashley Ertz started the group 5th Wave Collective especially to perform and promote music written by women. “Since April 2018, the volunteer-based group of more than 115 musicians has performed works by more than 50 female composers via 12 concerts throughout Chicagoland.” And the Chicago Sinfonietta under composer Mei-Ann Chen — who perform more female-authored music in a single program than the Chicago Symphony manages in several seasons put together — has just released a recording titled Project W: Works by Diverse Women Composers. – Chicago Tribune

Prescribing Art As Medical Treatment

The museum prescription was inspired by a movement in what’s called social prescribing. This has kind of taken off more in the UK. And in looking at the literature, we see that doctors were prescribing, in addition to things like eat better and get out there and walk more often, they were prescribing social activities within the patient’s community, with the belief that that was going to accelerate their healing and give them opportunity for more agency, that I am a participant in my healing. I’m not just waiting for something to be fixed for me. – Hyperallergic

Maya Turovskaya, ‘The Soviet Susan Sontag’, Dead At 94

She co-wrote the famous documentary Ordinary Fascism, which was seen by millions of ordinary Soviet citizens (and got past the censors because it was, on the surface, about the Nazis), but she spent most of her career as a widely admired theatre and film critic, “writing cultural criticism that was erudite and cleareyed — and that managed not to outrage the Soviet authorities.” – The New York Times

The Exquisite Awkwardness Of Literary Parties

 It must be that people don’t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There’s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It’s often suddenly 2 AM. Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust: “They drank a lot.” Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much. – Paris Review