Tag: 08.22.18

The Most Stolen Painting In The World

It is also “arguably the single most influential painting ever made. But while eleven-twelfths of it is intact, miraculously after so many centuries of adventures, one-half of one key panel remains missing.” Noah Charney retells the story of the “Ghent Altarpiece,” Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

Our Phones Are Changing The Ways Families Behave

A new nationally representative survey about “screen time and device distractions” from the Pew Research Center indicates that it’s not just parents who think teenagers are worryingly inseparable from their phones—many teens themselves do, too. Fifty-four percent of the roughly 750 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed said they spend too much time absorbed in their phones, and 65 percent of parents said the same of their kids’ device usage more generally.

‘Pained Admiration’: Two Indian Writers Try To Make Peace With V.S. Naipaul

“I suspect you feel it as well: how to speak about a writer whose work has been meaningful — in my case, profoundly so; I could not imagine my life without it — as well as a source of frustration or real pain. I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer.” Pankaj Mishra and Nikil Saval exchange letters.

Meet Glyndebourne’s New Artistic Director

With Stephen Langridge’s appointment, managerial responsibility has been split for the first time in many years. As artistic director he will share the task of steering the organisation with long-term insider Sarah Hopwood, until recently the company’s finance director but appointed managing director in May. Recent predecessors – such as Anthony Whitworth-Jones, who held the job from 1989 to 1998, David Pickard (2001-15), who now runs the BBC Proms, and Sebastian F Schwarz, who disappeared almost before he began in 2017 – held the top job alone.

Can An Algorithm Really Figure Out How Sad A Song Is? (And If So, What’s The Saddest Number-One Hit?)

The folks at Spotify think so. Their valence scale (higher = happier, lower = sadder) has “been used to develop a ‘gloom index’ of Radiohead songs, to reveal the most depressing Christmas song, [and] to find out which European countries prefer sad songs (Portuguese fado really is a downer).” So data journalist Miriam Quick took the 1,080 songs that have held the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 and looked at their Spotify valence scores – and she found that what the algorithm identifies as sad doesn’t quite track with what most humans think of as sadness.

The Spirit Of Burning Man, And Why It Just Doesn’t Fit Into A Museum

For all of its insane growth, creeping capitalism, and occasional insufferability, writes Jillian Steinhauer, the desert festival largely continues to uphold its “‘radically participatory ethic,’ the idea that there are no spectators because everyone can and should be involved in building the contents of Black Rock City.” The problem, when you try to put art from the festival into, say, a Smithsonian museum, is that “casual as they may try to be, art museums are, at the end of the day, uptight. They’re object repositories and arbiters of taste and culture. This makes them an uneasy fit with the rigorous populism of Burning Man, where everyone’s expression of creativity is welcome, no matter how primitive.”

The Edinburgh Festivals Have Gotten Too Enormous: Guardian Editorial

“For many, both locals and would-be visitors, the festivals represent not so much a joyous overabundance of culture as a costly impossibility. … The city comes under huge pressure during August: there are crowded streets, innumerable tour buses, and a city centre that can feel hollowed out by Airbnb lettings and more and more new luxury hotels. … Meantime, the festivals themselves are caught in the curious trap of endless expansionism: the notion that each year’s ought somehow to be bigger than the last, that increased ticket sales and more visitors are necessarily and unquestioningly to be celebrated.”

How To Choreograph Remotely, Via FaceTime And YouTube

“Video conferencing and smartphone apps make it possible to at least share the same screen space. But there are pros and cons to creating this way. Choreographers and dancers can be freed up for more opportunities. Yet almost all would still prefer to be in the same room, collaborating in real time. Here’s how some choreographers are making it happen.”

George Clooney Tops Forbes’s Annual List Of Best-Paid Actors With $239 Million

Granted, most of this is not for movie roles at all, or even endorsements: it comes from the purchase by a conglomerate of a tequila business Clooney co-founded five years ago. (Forbes‘s list includes income from endorsements and other “extracurricular” activities.) At no. 2 with $124 million is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who racked up the highest-ever income to come strictly from acting. (Unfortunately and predictably, the best-paid actress of the year earned much, much less.)