The Music Of Biology And The Biology Of Music

The argument that there is both an aliveness and a wholeness to organic life which is potentially recognizable to musicians in musical terms has in the past been easier to make for those immersed in the invisible, mycorrhyzal webs of oral traditions than in the architectural solidity of art music, with its notations, institutions, theories and formal pedagogies. But let’s not get stuck in these academic distinctions. – Resilience

How I Learned To Be A Kinder Critic

Josh Kosman: “If you’d asked me at the time, I could have unreeled a fairly high-minded manifesto about the central importance of honesty in criticism. None of it would have been wrong, exactly, but it also wouldn’t have been the whole truth. The rest of it — the part I left unacknowledged, even to myself — was that this philosophy was expressly designed to let me off the hook for whatever harm my writing might cause.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Minneapolis Theatre Looks Into The Future, Decides To Shut Down After One Last Season

The company realized last November that, given the current funding climate, it would not be able to sustain itself beyond the coming year. State and private grant priorities were shifting, Avitabile said, and a few key donors were no longer in a position to give. Rather than go into debt, 20% Theatre will use its last season to celebrate accomplishments. – MPR

Can Reading Fight Racism?

The pandemic changed some things, and then came the murder of George Floyd – and the largest civil rights movement in U.S. history. “Anti-racist manuals have been cleaned out from virtual bookstore shelves and pushed to the top of bestseller lists. And often, these buyers don’t want to read alone. Enter the anti-racist book club.” – BuzzFeed

This Artist’s 2014 Paintings Perfectly Envisage The Pandemic Lockdown

Thuy Van Vu’s empty classrooms feel eerily familiar right now, almost photographic. “The spaces she portrays are vast and full of potential, and also of a great, yawning absence. Where are the children? Their teachers? The chairs are piled awkwardly on top of the desks, everything pushed together, as if those who left were in a rush. There’s a sense that these desks and chairs have been lingering and might never be used again.” – Catapult

No One Is Listening To The Radio, But Everyone Is Listening To NPR

The drivetime listeners are gone, sending NPR’s radio ratings into the sub-sub-basement. Yet NPR is reaching 10 percent more people than at the same time last year. What gives? “Bringing a younger, more diverse audience into the NPR fold means reaching listeners on the platforms they’re already on — whether that’s putting podcasts on Spotify, music on YouTube, or newsy explainers on TikTok. … Executives are putting two and two together from the demographic reports and, bubbling up from the bottom, junior producers and interns want to produce content that their digital-native friends will actually see.” – Nieman Lab

Why A California Motorist’s “NULL” License Plate Set Him Up For $1000s In Tickets

That setup also has a brutal punch line—one that left Joseph Tartaro at one point facing $12,049 of traffic fines wrongly sent his way. He’s still not sure if he’ll be able to renew his auto registration this year without paying someone else’s tickets. And thanks to the Kafkaesque loop he’s caught in, it’s not clear if the citations will ever stop coming. – Wired