A reporter visits an evacuation drill at the Smithsonian, an exercise by the Heritage Emergency and Response Training program (HEART). Said one participant afterward, “I would do 200 things differently.”
Tag: 12.14.17
Our Great Modernist Landscapes Are Under Threat
Just as chokers and platform sandals are cool again, designers are expressing renewed interest in successful 1990s postmodern landscapes, like Wagner Park or Pershing Square. Despite their significance, these parks are now threatened by thoughtless development.
Conductors Do More Than Wave Their Hands (But What, Exactly?)
The person who stands before a symphony orchestra is charged with something both impossible and improbable. The impossible part is herding a hundred musicians to agree on something, and the improbable part is that one does it by waving one’s hands in the air.
Twin Cities Music School Shuts Down Without Warning
Just as the semester was ending, administrators at McNally Smith College of Music, a small, for-profit school in St. Paul, alerted faculty and students in a pair of email messages that the school did not have enough cash to make payroll and is closing on Dec. 20.
New Zora Neale Hurston Book Is Coming This Spring
“Barracoon tells the story of the last known person to survive the transatlantic slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Many know that Hurston was an acclaimed fiction writer, but here it is her work as an anthropologist that shines. Hurston was able to sit down in the Black community of Plateau, Alabama, which was founded by Cudjo Lewis and other ex-slaves from the ship that brought them to America, and talk with the then 95-year-old Lewis about his life in 1931.”
Martin Ransohoff, 90, Producer Of Classic ’60s Sitcoms And Feature Films
Among the evergreen television series his company, Filmways Television, produced were Mister Ed, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and The Addams Family; the titles he produced for the big screen included Save the Tiger, Catch-22, The Cincinnati Kid (he fired Sam Peckinpah as director and replaced him with Norman Jewison), and The Americanization of Emily.
How We Try To Understand Mind Control And Subverting Democracy
“The emerging picture of efforts to manipulate the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit referendum leads to an awkward paradox. For the first time in a long time, voters who recognized the rigged nature of the system voted in large enough numbers to overthrow “the swamp” of “politics as usual”; at the same time, the system itself was perhaps more rigged than ever, thanks to the new-fangled methods. While it is vital to expose how these worked, it is even more important also to develop a politics that validates voters’ legitimate repudiation of a corrupt establishment, rather than dismisses them as ignorant and gullible.”
Study: Bigger Cities Aren’t Always Better For Residents
Urbanization has historically been thought of as a necessary feature of economic development and growth, but this study finds the connection is not so simple. While advanced nations benefit from having larger cities, developing nations do not.
The Met’s Complicity In Ignoring James Levine’s Abuse Points To Big Problems In The Classical Music World
“Now, Levine will become a convenient scapegoat, and institutions will race to condemn him with prurient finger-wagging, piling on almost gleefully in their eagerness to aver that they will never, ever, not ever work with him again. Meanwhile, orchestras and opera houses and conservatories and choruses all across the country continue to harbor and protect leaders who egregiously abuse their power, who harass musicians who can’t speak up, who assault and rape in the self-satisfied knowledge that they can get away with it.”
Orchestra Mashes Up Beethoven And Kanye West
Time magazine spoke to Johan and Yuga Cohler, creators of Yeethoven and Yeethoven II, “about their process of piecing together the perfect orchestral mash-up, how a ‘risky project’ like this one can help popularize classical music and why Kanye makes a great case study as an artist with unexpectedly broad appeal.”