Tag: 12.04.17

Here’s The Ultimate Scientifically-Determined Playlist For When You’re Tripping On Mushrooms (And It Features Classical Music!)

Research psychologist Bill Richards, who works on clinical studies at Johns Hopkins in which patients are given psilocybin as a potential treatment for depression or anxiety or as an aid in quitting smoking, assembled the list, and he avoided trance and techno: “Orchestral music is less distracting and less likely to give room for a person to fall back on normal patterns of thinking.”

Before Edward Lear Was A Limerick Genius, He Was A Teenage Parrot-Painting Prodigy

“When he was young, Lear was employed as an ornithological illustrator, and he spent years learning to draw birds, favoring live models in an era when most worked from taxidermy. Before he turned 20, he’d published Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, a critical success, and the first monograph produced in England to focus on a single family of birds.”

Turning Hurricanes Into Music May Help Us Understand Them Better

“We are colleagues from different areas of the Penn State campus: One of us is a professor of meteorology, and the other a professor of music technology. Since 2014, we have been working together to sonify the dynamics of tropical storms. In other words, we turn environmental data into music. By sonifying satellite videos like those often seen in weather reports, we hope that people will better understand how these extreme storms evolve.” (includes video)

Emile Zola, Photographer

“Émile Zola is best known as the 19th century French author of celebrated works including Thérèse Raquin, Nana and Germinal. Now, the leader of the Naturalist literary movement is being recognised as a talented and experimental photographer with the auction of a rarely seen personal collection of pictures.”

Egypt Is Cracking Down On Reading

“Nothing seems to disturb Egypt’s ruling cadres more than the written word. The recent litany of bans and shutdowns, including blocking hundreds of web pages online, illustrates what Cambridge University’s Khaled Fahmy, a prolific historian of the Middle East, called “an alarmist moment of crisis,” one in which Egypt’s authoritarian state of emergency laws have turned something as simple as reading into a dangerous act.”

Venice Comes Up With A Solution To The Cruise Ship Problem (But Is It The Wrong One?)

“Currently, 500 to 600 ships – a yearly 1,000 to 1,200 entrances and exits – of up to 96,000 gross tonnes enter the lagoon from the Adriatic by the Lido opening to sail through Venice … But the Comitatone has rejected the solution favoured by environmental scientists and some politicians, which is to build a floating port outside the lagoon, from which passengers would be brought into town in smaller boats.”

Is Working Out Our New Fundamentalist Religion? (Sure Acts Like It)

“This conflation of the work of our bodies with the work of our lives can feel insidiously prosperity gospel–ish. The idea that better, harder, faster, and more are all concepts that are inextricably linked can certainly be motivating, but it can also be dangerous and damaging to equate them entirely. This doesn’t just happen in SoulCycle: It’s also present in CrossFit’s relentless, maximalist ethos, as well as more subtly in things like barre programs and kickboxing classes. Across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body will get smaller, your world will get bigger, and your life will get better, but only through rigorous, sweaty work.”

Why Are Theatres Paying Any Attention To Critics?

“Throughout my career, I’ve experienced critics stepping away from criticism to offer up a wide body of other advice from plays they want the theater to produce to which authors they like and what should be the theater’s strategic priorities. Are these meant to be helpful suggestions or instances where a critic is trying to influence artistic direction? Can theaters politely ignore the suggestions if we disagree, or even worse if it is well beyond their missions, or will the critic take offense?”