John Rawls: an ideal theorist for nonideal times?
John Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice” was published fifty years ago. What is the connection between Rawls’s abstract theorizing about justice and work aiming to address real-world injustices?
Tips for adapting the elementary music curriculum to online teaching
Teachers of the performing arts are adapting their classes to go online. The problems and challenges range from ensuring enough physical space for movement around each student’s computer to overcoming audio and video syncing delays during the live feed. But what about elementary music?
Five themes in Asian Shakespeare adaptations
Since the 19th century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs, and by the late 20th century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequently performed playwrights in East Asia.
Which literary heroine are you? [quiz]
To best celebrate the online launch of the Oxford World’s Classics, discover which literary heroine you are most like with our quiz.
Getting Domesday done: a new interpretation of William the Conqueror’s survey
A new interpretation of the Domesday survey, the famous survey of England taken on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1086, has emerged from a major study of the survey’s earliest surviving manuscript. It is now clear that the survey was more even more efficient, complex, and sophisticated than previously supposed.
The ruins of the post-Covid city—and the essential task of rebuilding
We are in the midst of a Covid economy that has decimated the cities of America. It’s essential for us all to recognize that we’re in this together and to support local and national efforts to rebuild, on the basis of a unified public consciousness that has been markedly absent from our divided nation in recent years.
Grove Music’s 2021 spoof article contest is now open!
I think we can all agree that recent months of pandemic and political unrest have been difficult ones, and often entirely bereft of humor. I am therefore pleased to announce the revival of the Grove Music Online Spoof Article Contest 2021.
Joseph Riepel and a very long hello
Joseph Riepel’s celebrated music theory treatise, Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst, unfolds in a lively and witty manner. Most of its chapters are framed in the guise of lessons, presented as dialogues between a teacher and student.
A Q&A with composer Becky McGlade
I was fortunate enough to rehearse daily with the Truro cathedral choristers from the age of 8 to 13 (in the days before girl choristers). This fostered in me a love for choral music and for singing, which has continued throughout my life.
Is the “distant sociality” and digital intimacy of pandemic life here to stay?
Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. As citizens of a world that suddenly feels both more alienated and radically—dangerously—connected, the term “social distancing” has been added to many of our vocabularies.
Technology in the elementary music classroom after the pandemic
The pandemic will leave a lasting impression on music education for years to come. Though we do not have to use technology every day after the pandemic ends, there are ways to use technology that can level up and benefit music-making with elementary students.
“Nero fiddled… Trump golfs”—but did Nero really fiddle while Rome burned?
“Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs.” Nero’s fiddle is back in the news thanks to Bernie Sander’s criticism of President Trump’s pandemic leadership. But are we being entirely fair to Nero?
Online music-making with nearly no lag time—really!
Susan Alexander found a way to fill the “big, depressing hole in your life where playing music with other people used to be” when she discovered JamKazam, one of several free music-making software programs that nearly eliminate the annoying lag time in sound transmission that occurs when musicians try to make music together on Zoom or Skype.
What is “representation” in the human brain and AI systems?
Neuroscience is beginning to make sense of what’s going on inside the human brain—a seemingly inscrutable organ of even great complexity. We can now see what some patterns of activity are, and we have an inkling of what they are doing, of how they track the environment, and subserve behaviour.
Essenes in Judaean Society: the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The sectarians reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, identified with the Essenes, were not the isolated community of popular imagination that spent their days praying, studying scriptures, and waiting for one or two messiahs in the desert.
Playing to lose: transhumanism, autonomy, and liberal democracy [long read]
[long read] Transhumanists insist that their vision of the “radical” bioenhancement of human capacities is light-years removed from prior eugenics, which was state managed. This reassuring, empowering picture is undercut by transhumanists’ own arguments, which offer incompatible pictures of personal autonomy in relation to decisions about the use of bioenhancement technologies.