“The argument for reopening our cultural institutions has been made with force: art sustains us, say the museum executives over the morning airwaves. But when I enter the exhibition, the first thing I wish is that, in the quest for sufficient sustenance, I’d brought a bottle of water—the mask dehydrates you quickly.” – Prospect
Tag: 08.01.20
The Trump Book Industry
Taken en masse, the books paint a damning portrait of the 45th president of the United States. But the sheer volume of unflattering material they contain can have the paradoxical danger of blunting their collective impact. After the 10th time you read about Mr. Trump’s short attention span, your own attention is in danger of wandering. – The New York Times
James Silberman, Who Edited Books That Changed America, Dead At 93
Among the many important titles he midwifed over a long career at Dial, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Little Brown were James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and The Fire Next Time, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, and Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. – The New York Times
Musicians Blast Spotify CEO For Comments On Royalties
The CEO ― whose net worth is estimated at over $4 billion ― argued in an interview with Music Ally published Thursday that there was a “narrative fallacy” around claims that Spotify’s royalties were too low, saying: “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” – HuffPost
The Weaponizing Of Free Speech
The “free speech” argument can be a useful tactic. But it’s not necessarily a successful one in the long term. Overusing it can turn real debates into insoluble meta-arguments with no room for compromise, driving a self-perpetuating dynamic in which one party exudes a feigned and slyly provocative equilibrium while the other becomes increasingly bitter and confrontational. – Washington Post
A Machine That Responds Intelligently To Queries
GPT-3 is a product of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab based in San Francisco. In essence, it’s a machine-learning system that has been fed (trained on) 45 terabytes of text data. Given that a terabyte (TB) is a trillion bytes, that’s quite a lot. Having digested all that stuff, the system can then generate all sorts of written content – stories, code, legal jargon, poems – if you prime it with a few words or sentences. – The Guardian
Neighbors Performing Music For Neighbors Hasn’t Stopped
And, in the U.S., it may be just getting started. A cellist in Pasadena who performs weekly with his wife, a pianist, says, “We thought with so much suffering, and so much anxiety, this is something very small that we can try to do to help.” – Los Angeles Times
Victor Victor, Musician Who Brought Music, Dance, And Theatre To The Underprivileged, 71
Víctor’s hit was the 1991 “Mesita de la Noche,” but before that, his son says, the Dominican singer/songwriter/producer had “lived a double life. … He was writing romantic songs and being an artist, but he was also part of the underground political movement” opposed to dictator Rafael Trujillo. – The New York Times
Putting Up A Monument To The Unknown Enslaved People Of The United States
As the Civil War raged, Kentucky was officially neutral – but it was a slave state. Freedom lay just across the river in Indiana, says poet Hannah Drake, whose nonprofit is preparing to install a kind of monument to those who dreamt of escape. “The memorial will start as a path of cast or carved footprints. That will lead people from nearby history museums to the river, where there will be limestone benches. Then there will be more footprints leading to the river’s edge.” – NPR
That Time A Research Librarian Discovered His Library Owned A First Edition Of Beethoven’s Sixth
At the Moravian Music Foundation, librarian David Blum “was doing a routine cataloging of material that the foundation has owned for years, [when] he noticed the plate number of the printing was 1809, his first clue that he was onto a first edition. He thought that would be great — but unlikely.” And yet. – Winston-Salem Journal