Longtime London music critic and Cape Town native John Allison remembers how the apartheid-era government lavished funding on this European art form and how South Africa’s companies faded away once real democracy arrived. Now, he says, “opera has been reinvented” in his hometown and “is unmistakably part of the ‘new’ South Africa.”
Tag: 05.10
Our Brains At Play – The Essential Learning
“It seems to have multiple functions–exercise, learning, sharpening skills–and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.”
How Much Memory Do Our Brains Have, Anyway?
“The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. … Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).” (That’s enough for 3.5 million hours of TV shows.)
Bully Boys Vs. Mean Girls: Are Men More Belligerent Than Women?
In the 1970s, two Stanford Univ. psychologists “concluded in an influential book that sex differences were minimal in most psychological traits but considerable when it comes to aggression. This opinion has endured ever since. … Recent research bears out the broad brushstrokes of their claim but reveals that women can be equally, if less dangerously, belligerent.”
Peter Gelb Goes For Broke (Ahem) At The Met
Is the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager “presiding over a leap into the 21st century, or the slow decline of the world’s greatest (and most extravagant) opera house? Examining the Met’s $47 million deficit, the horrendous economics of opera, and the effort to sell high culture to the masses, the author reveals what a huge risk the controversial impresario is taking.”