Usually I would prefer referring to any piece its legitimate academic catalogue (eg. the No. 2 Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Op. 61). But Shostakovich composed inventive scores for roughly 35 feature films across his life, starting as a silent-film pianist in Leningrad — which means a lot of his work is scatterly film music and impossible to catalogue. Shostakovich originally composed what has become known as the Waltz No. 2 in 1955-56 for his score (Op. 99) for the film The First Echelon (Pervyi eshelon), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, which had its premiere on April 29, 1956. The waltz was also included in the Suite from The First Echelon (Op. 99a) arranged by Shostakovich and Levon Atovmyan in 1956. ...

Huh? Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly Caitlin K. Myers & Ezekiel Hooper. DOI 10.3386/w35310 The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency. ...

The lawn first. Ravinia’s main stage has just come out of a $70 million renovation. Mow the Hunter Pavilion, with a wider stage and a ziggurat-patterned acoustic shell. It looks like money really well spent. So does the merch — 24 dollars for a mug is a lot of admiration. Sibelius’s first movement has those long exposed lines where the violin hangs alone in the air, and the air was already full, among cicadas in the tree — very relentless, arhythmic, and unbothered with the music. ...

The Goldbergs end where they began — the Aria returns verbatim after thirty variations. In the 1981 Gould, the returning Aria sounds lonelier than the opening one. It seems nothing changed. You did.

Schiff is the thinking pianist’s pianist — no showmanship, every phrase deliberate. His 2017 live recording at the Pierre Boulez Saal is the Goldbergs given back to Bach: legato, transparent, unmannered.

Radu Lupu (1945–2022) was famously reclusive — few recordings, almost no interviews, a public career conducted as if publicity were a mild embarrassment. He won the Leeds, the Van Cliburn, and the George Enescu competitions in the late 1960s and then largely refused to behave like someone who had. At the keyboard he never pushed a phrase toward you. His recording of Schubert’s final piano sonata, D.960 — the opening movement’s long, suspended melody arrives without urgency, as if he simply found it there and decided not to disturb it. ...

At twenty-two, Gould persuaded Columbia Records to let an unknown Canadian record Bach for his debut. The result was fast, angular, and completely sure of itself — ornaments cut like percussion, canons that snap, thirty variations in under forty minutes, and Gould humming audibly throughout the whole thing.

Gould recorded this in September 1981, three weeks before he died at fifty. The 1981 Goldbergs are slow, breathing, inhabited — where the 1955 was argument, this is something closer to acceptance.

I watched the Odessey today and 3 hours feels so long, especially with the LOUD sound in the cinema. How do they even made it that loud? It’s the first Nolan movie that disappointed me. There are so many aspects of it being bad that I find it hard to logically critique the movie. Tempo is not good (bad script), emotion and content is not good, characters feels unmotivated, clueless and plain; set is not realistic, editing and engineering is not good, acting of some actors is really blant, etcetc. But overall the worst problem is, as Time-Bridge-3007 writes in their Reddit review The Odyssey is anti-art: ...

It’s kinda cool: The Economist’s new Big Max Index article The value of a currency should reflect its purchasing power, its command over goods and services. (Gustav Cassel) …we collect prices on just one: the Big Mac. It is available almost everywhere, and tastes much the same. Source: The Economists. https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2026/07/30/the-big-mac-index-at-40 Read it here: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2026/07/30/the-big-mac-index-at-40.