What Happens When You’re The Only One?

“Every minute she’s asked to spend serving that function, valuable and necessary as it is, and perfectly understandable as it is that people are curious about her experiences, is a minute she’s not answering the same questions Damon Lindelof gets, or Joss Whedon gets, or Chuck Lorre gets. She’s not talking about her process, she’s not talking about her characters, she’s not telling her silly show business stories.”

Vienna State Opera Boss Defends Himself Following Conductor Walkouts

Early this month Franz Welser-Möst suddenly (but discreetly) quit as the house’s principal conductor; eleven days later, Bertrand de Billy angrily resigned, hurling accusations at the company’s Intendant, Dominique Meyer. Now Meyer is responding, saying, “We went into the summer season at peace. Now these allegations. I cannot understand where they’ve come from.”

Nashville Symphony And Musicians Agree on Four-Year Contract (With Raises!)

“The agreement, which goes into effect immediately, provides 3 percent pay increases for the first two years of the deal. The musicians may enter into a wage renegotiation for each of the last two years of the deal. Last year, with the Schermerhorn Symphony Center facing foreclosure, the musicians took a 15 percent pay reduction and worked on a one-year deal.”

Do Ideas Actually Matter?

“If you go to the Boston Review Web site, you’ll find the slogan ‘Ideas Matter’ gracing the top of the homepage. … But in the social sciences, the idea that ideas matter has always been controversial. How much do ideas really matter? Do they affect individuals and societies more or less than do material circumstances such as economic incentives, physical constraints, and military force?” (In one way, definitely.)

Spoilers – They’re All About Social Power

“Revealing … dramatic plot twists and turns of hit television shows used to be considered a social faux pas. Today,” according to a study for Netflix conducted by a cultural anthropologist, “the motivation for spoiling a show for someone else now is about more than just watching TV, he said. It is about the politics of daily life.”

Why Being Wrong Is The Future Of Design

It was a “major creative breakthrough for me—the idea that intentional wrongness could yield strangely pleasing results. Of course I was familiar with the idea of rule-breaking innovation—that each generation reacts against the one that came before it, starting revolutions, turning its back on tired conventions. But this was different. I wasn’t just throwing out the rulebook and starting from scratch. I was following the rules, then selectively breaking one or two for maximum impact.”