The summer of 1954, which the author and his family spent in Paris, was when Steinbeck wrote the just-rediscovered short story “The Amiable Fleas” for his column in Le Figaro. But that wasn’t all he was up to, writes Christopher Dickey: there’s documentary evidence that he was gathering intelligence for the CIA. (Whether he found anything useful is another matter.) – The Daily Beast
Tag: 07.31.19
Tanglewood Moves Into The Thriving Lecture Business (But Yes, It’s Mostly Lectures About Music)
“With the opening this summer of the Linde Center for Music and Learning, the campus’s first major construction project in a quarter of a century, [the Boston Symphony’s summer home] is dramatically expanding its programming of lectures, talks and master classes.” Reporter Michael Cooper pays a visit. – The New York Times
The Long, Slow Implosion Of Woodstock 50: A Timeline
“January 9, 2019: Everything’s Just Peachy …
March 5, 2019: … Or Is it?”
– Vulture
Inside The Final Collapse Of Woodstock 50
“Seth Hurwitz was on a bike trip riding across Europe when news of his last ditch effort to save the long-suffering Woodstock 50 festival had leaked out.” – Billboard
Woodstock 50 Is Cancelled For Good
Less than a week ago, it looked like the endlessly troubled festival was saved, with a move to Maryland from upstate New York (where no one would give them a permit). But within a day of the location change, the scheduled bands (who’d already been paid) started pulling out. – Rolling Stone
Bankrupt Billionaire’s Major Modern Art Collection Seized By Portuguese Government
“The 75-year-old [José Berardo], who has been described as the ‘Portuguese Charles Saatchi,’ used his 900-piece collection — which includes works by Picasso, Bacon, and Basquiat, among others — as collateral for bank loans of nearly €1 billion … The majority of the works are on loan to the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, one of the country’s most visited art museums.” – Artnet
The World’s Tallest Public Artwork Is Coming (To A Belgian Highway)
“Arc Majeur, an imposing 250-tonne steel structure [that will be 60 meters tall], will stand over the busy E411 between the city of Namur and Luxembourg, a spot chosen partly on the basis that a driver’s view will be unencumbered by any lampposts.” – The Guardian
Spotify Adds 8 Million Users, Now Has 108 Million
Spotify expects to add between 2 million and 6 million premium subscribers in the third quarter, and hopes to reach between 120-125 million paid users by the year’s end. The company also said the audience for its podcasts — a primary target for future growth, in which is has invested hundreds of millions of dollars — has grown 50% over the first quarter of 2019. – Variety
Why Learning Is Declining In Our Classrooms
The combination of computer use, Internet, and smart phone, I would argue, has changed the cognitive skills required of individuals. Learning is more and more a matter of mastering various arbitrary software procedures that then allow information to be accessed and complex operations to be performed without our needing to understand what is entailed in those operations. This activity is then carried on in an environment where it is quite normal to perform two, three, or even four operations at the same time, with a general and constant confusion of the social, the academic, and the occupational. – New York Review of Books
Unknown John Steinbeck Short Story Discovered
“The author … lived in Paris in the mid-1950s, where he wrote a weekly column for the French daily Le Figaro called ‘One American in Paris’. One of his pieces took the form of a short story, ‘Les Puces sympathiques‘. Published in French on 31 July 1954, … [it’s being published] in English this week [in The Strand magazine] as ‘The Amiable Fleas.'” – The Guardian