Squid Game is anything but your typical, saccharine, soft-glow Korean television drama. In this biting commentary on life in South Korea today, viewers are presented with a twisting, technicolour story of violence, betrayal and desperation. All of this is set around a series of macabre games in which players literally fight to the death. Despite...
In his autobiography, Miles Davis complained that classical musicians were like robots. He spoke from experience – he’d studied classical music at Juilliard and recorded with classical musicians even after becoming a world-renowned jazz artist. As a music professor at the University of Florida, which is transforming itself into an “AI university,” I often think...
Over the last year, handshakes have been replaced by fist or elbow bumps as a greeting. It shows that age-old social conventions can not only change, but do so suddenly. But how does this happen? Robotic engineers and marketing scientists from the University of Groningen joined forces to study this phenomenon, combining online experiments and...
Megamusicals have often been criticised in the academic world and in the media for their homogenizing tendencies, but increasing academic attention on them is providing us with new insights. In her inaugural lecture at the University of Amsterdam, professor by special appointment of the Musical Millie Taylor will outline the impact of megamusicals on local...
There’s growing awareness – and concern – about declining birthrates in the U.S. and other countries around the world. Falling birth rates are usually seen as a sign of societal decline, a nation’s diminishing power, and the eclipse of marriage and family values. Rarely are they put into any kind of historical context. But birthrates...
When Dante Alighieri died 700 years ago, on Sept. 14, 1321, he had just put his final flourishes on the “Divine Comedy,” a monumental poem that would inspire readers for centuries. The “Divine Comedy” follows the journey of a pilgrim across the three realms of the Christian afterlife – hell, purgatory and paradise. There, he...
Playing professional football games in empty stadiums had a hugely negative effect on the success of home teams, with home advantage almost halved, new research shows. Home advantage describes the benefit a sports team playing at their own venue is said to enjoy over the visiting team. This could be attributed to the effect of...
After years of pressure, Germany recently announced that an agreement had been reached to return hundreds of priceless artefacts and artworks that had been looted from Nigeria in colonial times and were on display in German museums. Commonly called the Benin Bronzes, these beautiful and technically remarkable artworks have come to symbolise the broader restitution...
We think of leaders and influencers as imbued with special skills and qualities – either innate or hard-won merit – that propels them to success, high status and financial rewards. Self-help books on how to build leadership skills abound. However, new research that models the evolution of social networks suggests it is less about individual skills and...
In the popular imagination, New York City is a mass of soaring steel-frame skyscrapers. But many of the city’s 1 million buildings are not that modern. Behind their brick-and-mortar facades, its numerous 19th- and early 20th-century warehouses, commercial buildings and row homes are framed with massive wooden joists and beams. These structures probably harbor at...
