It is with a glad heart that I welcome everyone to the New Year, 2021.

The out-gone year was quite dramatic and it is only by the grace of the Almighty God that we survived to witness the succeeding year.

It is cheering that we are entering the New Year with refreshing news of a handful of certified vaccines against the dreaded Covid-19 virus. And better still is news of commencement of vaccination in some parts of the world.

I am expectant that the vaccine(s) would soon be available for vaccination in Nigeria. It is also hoped that very soon life would return to normal.

As a country, we have taken our share of the blow that Covid-19 dealt to the globe. And worst still, we suffered a multi-facet downcast on account of lazy and uninspiring leadership from the government at the centre - most especially.

Something that would help our field, it seems to me, is to separate the Music Director position from the Principal Conductor position at orchestras. If nothing else, you'd get a wider range of musical tastes/interests at the top, which would serve the institutions well.

I've also seen too many situations where big/biggish-name conductors shoot down an idea that has the backing of their orchestras' creative staff, because it's just not of personal interest to them. Conductor ego is a substantial source of regressive energy in classical music.

We have a *major* resource problem in the field of new music. There's not enough $ to go around, and definitely not enough to make the field truly open and accessible. In that light, we need to be strategic about targeting the spaces where new resources could come to the table.

I've long been critical of orchestras, but I've never said we should tear them down. Far from it. Orchestras are central arts organizations with access to community resources of all kinds, including but not limited to $. That's why they have to become true leaders in the field.

Do you know how hard it is for a new music organization to develop the kind of resource base that an orchestra has? A few have come close, but it's practically impossible, especially now, with so much arts funding having dried up and no new apparent boom on the horizon from tech$

PUB DAY! My book, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy, is officially out with @UCpress. Can I tell you a little bit about it? Thread:

The book argues that 20th century Mexican economists, diplomats, and political figures had a surprising influence on the design and reform of a whole host of multilateral institutions and agreements meant to govern international trade and finance from the 1920s to the 1980s.

Mexican postrevolutionary state officials argued for representation in international organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. From the 1920s to the 1940s, they effectively conceptualized and advocated for the apparatus of international development.

The book shows how, working in collaboration & contention with other Latin American and Third World representatives, Mexican officials demanded reforms to the global economic system that would channel the surplus capital of the Global North to productive use in the Global South.

But then something funny happened on the way to the developmental state: once capital began to flow from multilateral institutions like the World Bank, and Mexico reentered the international financial system, it abandoned its role as a reform champion in the 1950s and 1960s.

🧵THREAD🧵
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." - Reagan

Thread: I don't know about you, but staying sane recently hasn't been that easy. I've found it particularly hard to read novels - something that is usually my go-to therapy.

BUT I've always loved radio, and especially radio drama, and...

I was giving someone a few recommendations for things to listen to on BBC Sounds and realised I was getting carried away. I've heard tons of really good stuff in the past year and a lot of it is still online.

So here are some links! (stay tuned - this will take a while).

Firstly, there's Primo Levi's 'The Periodic Table' - unutterably brilliant. If you haven't heard this you've just got to stop what you're doing and do so.

Then there's Big Girl, Small Town by @michellegallen

Brilliant - probably the best thing I've heard on radio on a long time. A dark secret gradually gets revealed (or not) in small town near the British border in Ireland.

For a bit of fun there are two Charles Paris Mysteries - A Doubtful Death / The Cinderella Killer. Bill Nighy plays a slightly louche thespian with a bent for amateur sleuthing. Funny dramas based on old radio plays by Simon Brett updated by Jeremy Front.

happy new year, all. i’ve barely had time to absorb new music or artists in 2020, because mostly i’ve been listening with ash, and all he wants is the Grease soundtrack over and over (and over. and over). but here’s a little list of my top ten. ready?

1. Fiona Apple - Fetch The Bolt Cutters
In Three Words: homespun percussive truth-bangers
For Fans Of: feminism, confessional lyrics
Note: not background listening

2. Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher
In Three Words: scream of consciousness
For Fans Of: kimya dawson, courtney barnett
Note: kills you softly

3. Laura Jane Grace - Stay Alive
In Three Words: laura spills survival
For Fans of: against me, punk, confessional songwriting
Note: listen to our podcast dammit

4. Reb Fountain - Reb Fountain
In Three Words: soft dark-soul dive
For Fans of: kathleen edwards, mazzy star
Note: she’s a new kiwi friend. and i just found out red is my COUSIN.

How about a New Year's Eve thread about Gordon Parks & the photo world's deeply entrenched culture of white supremacy? Ok? Let's go.

We celebrate Gordon Parks as one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century. Rightfully so. His photos were more than exquisite aesthetic objects. They also profoundly shaped the way that white people saw & understood poverty & race. BUT...

But we rarely talk about *why* Parks was able to achieve so much in the photo world.

The answer is simple & clear: He -- alone among Black photographers of his & earlier generations -- received the same kind of mentoring & opportunities that as promising white photographers.

During most of photography's history, the single most important predictor of mainstream professional success was the possession of a white skin.

Today’s the 8 year anniversary of the release of A Memory of Light, the 14th and concluding volume in The Wheel of Time.

8 years since it ended. Wow. Although we all know there are no endings to the turning of the WoT!

(Thread)

Info:
https://t.co/QEdSOyTapw

#twitteroftime

The title to this book was one RobertJordan thought of when he was finishing up edits on Knife of Dreams. He never explained the exact meaning although @BrandSanderson would later offer his version of it.

The closing epigraph of the book is one of my favorites:

“He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone.”

There’s a story behind that quote.

Robert Jordan came up with that wind quote. He and Harriet were traveling to New York to meet with their publisher @torbooks. He shared the quote with Harriet, who was struck by it & really loved it.

The quote referred to Rand, of course, but after RJ died, it spoke more to Harriet about her husband than it did about the character. The quote was included in RJ’s prayer card from his funeral. I still have one.

My wife and I led a very successful Zoom party for New Year's Eve. I thought I'd share details and tips in case it helps others. We had about 15 squares worth of people on the screen. The two main activities were charades and singing songs related to time. 1/14

An issue we were worried about was tech support during the event, since not everybody was familiar with all Zoom features. We were planning to use a breakout room or two in case people got bored with an activity and wanted to talk, but never needed it. 2/

To aid in tech support, we used BOTH a laptop (with external monitor) & a separate iPad. That way, I could ensure that my instructions on what to tap worked, see what the others were seeing, etc. The iPad had audio off & we shared a good external mike connected to the laptop. 3/

Since I needed to work closely with the laptop, I had to sit right in front. The second device let my wife also sit right in front of a camera. The external mike cut down on room echoes since she was closer to it than the laptop's mike and made our voices equal. 4/

We asked everybody to rename themselves to be the names of who we were seeing (e.g., "Joe and Jane Smith" instead of "JSmith iPad"). That required tech support for most people. (It's different on iPad and laptop.) We introduced everybody, telling how we met them. 5/

THREAD: 1) Hollywood Celebrities and the "Elites" (of DC & the Media) tell you it's an oppressive system because they not only preside over that system of YOUR oppression, they financially benefit from that illusion as they cash the check from their owner.

The following puts everything in a nice neat package. Lets do this! 🔥🔥🔥

I’ve recently been reading through “The Butchering Art”, a terrific account of 19th century surgery & the introduction of germ theory & anesthesia to Victorian medicine. I highly recommend reading it yourself, but here are some interesting tidbits that caught my attention (1/10)

(2) First, as you can imagine, early surgery was absolutely awful & almost always a last resort. One thing I didn’t realize was that back then, the best surgeons were the *fastest* surgeons — for instance, Robert Liston could remove a leg in less than thirty seconds (!).

(3) Early surgery was limited to “peripheral” conditions, like lacerations & fractures. This is because entering the body in surgery was almost always fatal due to infection. This led to the distinction of physicians practicing “internal medicine”, a term that still persists.

(4) More dangerous than the surgeries were post-operative infections & diseases. Four were particularly common — gangrene, septicemia, pyemia, and erysipelas — & were known as “hospitalism”. With the rise of early anesthesia came a rise in attempted surgeries & hospitalism.

(5) What’s wild about this era, looking back, is that no one really knew what was going on... but their theories made some sense. “Contagionists” thought disease was communicable, being transferred from person to person by “invisible bullets” or chemicals. Not the craziest idea.