“The classical audition ranks among the world’s toughest job interviews. Each applicant has 10 minutes at most to play in a way so memorable that he stands out among a lineup of other world-class musicians.”
Tag: 06.12
Experiments In Arts Journalism
“If the public’s only encounter with arts criticism comes via tweets or YouTube videos, is it any wonder that it can’t articulate or appreciate the value of the arts and humanities? Thus the understandable though self-defeating recourse to coverage that sees that the arts are valuable mainly because of their economic benefits or their potential for gossip.”
An Arts Degree? Survey Says: You’re Happier, More Likely To Be Employed
“According to SNAAP’s survey of 36 000 creative arts grads, their unemployment rate is half that of the national average and 71% of bachelor’s degree holders in the arts and 86% of those with an MA are working or have worked as professional artists.”
How We Visualize What We Read
“Strangely, when we remember the experience of reading a book, we imagine a continuous unfolding of images. We imagine, in essence, that the experience of reading was like that of watching a film. For instance I remember reading Anna Karenina: ‘I saw Oblonsky, and then I saw Oblonsky’s house, and then I saw this, and then that …’ But this is not what actually happens.”
Is The Proliferation Of University Degrees Making Us Root-bound?
“Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings.”
Is Twitter Killing The Way We Write?
“The economic cheapness of digital publication democratizes expression and gives a necessary public to writers, and types of writing, that otherwise would be confined to the hard drive or the desk drawer. And yet the supreme ease of putting words online has opened up vast new space for carelessness, confusion, whateverism. Outside of Twitter, a coercive blogginess, a paradoxically de rigueur relaxation, menaces a whole generation’s prose (no, yeah, ours too).”
Is Too Much Data Making Us Stupid? (C’Mon… You Already Know The Answer)
“The advent of digital information and with it the era of big data allows geneticists to decode the human genome, humanists to search entire bodies of literature, and businesses to spot economic trends. But it is also creating for many the sense that we are being overwhelmed by information. How are we to manage it all?”
Google’s Search For Knowledge
“Google’s Knowledge Graph adds a new dimension to searches, because the company now keeps track of what many search terms mean. That’s what allows the system to recognize the connection between Margaret Thatcher (the person) and Grantham (her place of birth)–not because the two strings show up together on a lot of Web pages.”
To Know Time Is To Always Be Late
“I note that it is 4:30 at 4:30: ‘I looked at the clock at 4:30 and saw that it was 4:30.’ This underlines the extent to which, as timers, we both stand outside of time and are immersed in it. To know that it is 4:30 is to be at 4:30, and also to be looking on 4:30 as if from a temporal outside. So in subjecting time to timing, we seem to have succeeded in stepping to one side of time in some respect, while of course, remaining in it.”
A Library Of Everything (Is It Really Possible?)
“If it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant’s book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape.”