Tag: 08.07.18

Why Missy Mazzoli Writes ‘Accessible’ Music

“There was a postwar feeling that things should not be romantic, people moving away from a romantic aesthetic to something colder and more calculated, both in the music and in attitude to the audience as a whole. That attitude doesn’t relate to our contemporary culture. I see why it happened, but I don’t find it interesting as a way to move forward for myself. My mission is to connect with people. The purpose of creating music is to feel less alone, to create a community around the work to express something that can’t be expressed in words.”

Hollywood’s Billion-Dollar Plan To Make And Market Ten-Minute Videos For Smartphones

NewTV, founded and led by former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg and with former eBay and HP chief Meg Whitman as CEO, “is aiming to launch by the end of 2019, with a premium lineup of original, short-form series comprising episodes of 10 minutes each. The service will have two subscription tiers,” with and without advertising. Just about every major Hollywood studio has bought in.

Is QAnon Really An Activist Art Hoax?

In its fundamentals, the idea is that the QAnon conspiracy seems suspiciously similar to the plot of Q, a best-selling novel by a team of anarchist media activists collectively known as “Luther Blissett,” first published in Italian in 1999. The suggestion, evidently, originates with Twitter posts by the “Wu Ming Foundation,” the name of a present-day literary collective formed by former Luther Blissett members

When Algorithms Decide Your Creativity

Words matter to me. I am a professional writer, after all. But then Gmail made it tantalizingly easy to say “hi” instead of “hey,” and Google’s prediction, albeit wrong at first, became self-fulfilling. It wasn’t until two weeks after I began using Smart Compose that I realized I had handed over a small part of my identity to an algorithm.

An Opera About The Dr. Ruth Of 1920s England

“In 1918, six months before the end of the first world war, Marie Stopes published Married Love. … There’s nothing about sexual problems, nor contraception (apart from one chapter), but instead, she writes about the ecstasy of fulfillment.” (The book played a key role in an episode of Downton Abbey.) She then received tens of thousands of letters asking for advice – about sexual problems, venereal diseases, and above all, contraception. Composer Alex Mills and librettist Jennifer Thorp have turned a collection of those letters into a chamber opera.

We Need Public Scholars. So The NEH Is Helping To Support Them

It turns out that many biographers and historians need to eat — and pay rent and buy clothes for their children. Such earthly demands push most scholars into academic jobs at colleges and universities, where they’re rewarded for producing arcane work that remains cloistered in the hallowed halls of academe.The National Endowment for the Humanities is determined to break down those walls. Since 2015, the NEH has been funding the Public Scholar program, an annual series of grants designed to promote the publication of scholarly nonfiction books for a general audience.

Aaron Sorkin Called The Internet A ‘Bronchial Infection On The First Amendment’. He May Have Been Right

“Sorkin’s critiques of digital life looked especially off base in the 2000s and early 2010s, when the internet was a less broken place than it now is. The platforms looked like tools instead of weapons, and Sorkin looked like a boring crank. Now, though, instead of an old man yelling at the sky, Sorkin looks more like a middle-aged man yelling at a mountain of trash emitting toxic fumes. He’s still not offering any productive solutions, but he’s not incorrect.”