Tag: 07.23.19

Unlikely Success: How Small Publisher Faber & Faber Got To Be 90 Years Old

“The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat; it also raises the question of who, ultimately, a publishing house like Faber & Faber really belongs to. Is it the stockholders, whose involvement in the day-to-day life of the company is sometimes remote? Is it the staff—publishers, editors, and others—who set the tone and direction during their tenure? Or is it the writers, whose work is the company’s real raison d’être and lifeblood?” – The New Yorker

David Brooks Plays Art Critic, Decries Politicization Of Art

“Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.” – The New York Times

For Those Who Listened, The Fall Of The Facebook-Dependent News Site Mic Sounded An Alarm

As founders bragged about round after round of funding, those doing the actual work of providing content were getting fed up – and exploited. Millennials who were watching took nervous note. “Like its cousins BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Vice, Mic at times relied on its young and diverse staff to churn out content, respond nimbly to every change in the Facebook algorithm and sometimes even mine their personal pain for clicks in the pursuit of blistering traffic growth.” – HuffPost

The Metropolitan Museum’s In-House Analytical Chemist

“Where others concentrate on specific paintings or sculptures, [Eric] Breitung … takes a broad approach: ‘My focus is the environment of the whole museum.’ That means preparing the Met for some 60 exhibitions each year, in spaces that range from 100 to 20,000 square feet. Design elements for each exhibit contain chemicals that could be damaging, depending on the art.” – National Geographic

Of Course We Make Decisions Based On Rational Information… Don’t We?

“Even statistical decision theorists do not make serious choices by consulting cold, textbook models. Like the rest of us, they resort to a knottier combination of deliberation, gut feel and blind hope. For choices, so too for beliefs, which, when met with evidence, are pushed and pulled by processes that are equally mysterious.” – The Guardian

Marius Petipa Virtually Established Classical Ballet As We Know It Today. But Most Of His Own Ballets Were Pretty Bad

The standards set by the French-born ballet master in his decades at the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg have had a defining influence on the art form ever since. But only three of his story ballets — Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, and Don Quixote — are in the repertory today, and of those only Sleeping Beauty has a genuinely good score. The rest, argues Alastair Macaulay, have “preposterous” plots, forgettable music, and values that were retrograde and out-of-step with even his own time and place, let alone ours. – The New York Times