The market for classical music has never been larger than it is now, yet the number of full-time soloists on any given instrument is also on the order of only a few hundred (and much smaller for instruments other than voice, violin, and piano). Performers of first rank comprise a limited handful out of these small totals and have very large incomes. There are also known to be substantial differences in income between them and those in the second rank, even though most consumers would have difficulty detecting more than minor differences in a “blind” hearing. (Rosen 1981) ...

Joffrey’s winter season show the American Icons is on. It features four contemporary choreographies in one night. Kettentanz choreographed by Gerald Arpino, with music by Johann Strauss Sr. Secular Games by Martha Graham Exerpt from Postcards by Robert Joffrey, with music by Satie Voluntaries by Glen Tetley, with music by Francis Poulenc A view into the kaleidoscope night: The night begins with — Teletubbies? Just kidding. The Kettentanz features Strauss Sr.’s cheerful composition — straightforward, happy, a little boring. As if it’s chosen intentionally to mimic the music we hear at ballet classes (but my standard is Tchaikovsky and Chopin, so judge not the pianist not, judge me). Kettentanz’s choreography feels less like an piece intended for performance and more like an etudes — a series of Grand Allegros, with dense technique showcase and seldom thinkings. You’ll see what I mean: ...

In my hugo papermod powered website where math is rendered by Katex, math blocks were silently failing to render mid-page. Everything after a certain point appeared as raw LaTeX. Here’s the fix. NOTE: The fix is generated by Claude. It works. But I’m not sure if the mechanism is 100% correct. But it works. Root Causes 1. Goldmark mangles math before KaTeX sees it Hugo uses Goldmark as its Markdown renderer. Goldmark processes the .md file first — and it escapes or corrupts characters like \, _, {, } inside math delimiters. By the time KaTeX receives the string, the LaTeX is broken. ...

In the early days of recording, the microphone could only cleanly capture a narrow frequency range. So engineers were like: we’ll just record what the microphone handles. Fair enough. Then the microphone got better. Then digital audio arrived. Then we could capture everything. But by then, scholars had already proven theoretically that music only contains those frequencies. The proof was very elegant. It won a Gramophone award. And to this day, grad students learn that a symphony is just a low-frequency hum with robust standard errors. ...

Another lecture note from macroeconomic class. Question: why the log GDP per capita are widely different across countries and that they doesn’t seem to converge? Estimates of the distribution of countries according to log GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) in 1960, 1980 and 2000. Courtesy to Theory of Income II class. ...

Good news for the weekend? Increased Scrutiny Leads to an Improved Organ Transplant System NYTimes Background: a lot of things were problematic and NYTimes has been covering it, getting a lot of attention and debates: Organ Transplant System ‘in Chaos’ as Waiting Lists Are Ignored NYTimes Note: this article has pretty good data, and is well presented. The way statistic facts are visualized within the article is interactive, adequately (almost perfectly) inserted. It’s a smooth read and very well structured, informative article. ...

The symphony hall smells expensive on Feb 14. As ushers barely got the time to nudge the couples chugging off champaigns and sit down, the valentines day night concert began with Joel Thomson’s To See the Sky. The title of the work comes from my favorite line in Cécile McLorin Salvant’s “Thunderclouds,” my favorite song on her album Ghost Songs: “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky.” That line gave me so much hope when I heard it. It’s an encouragement toward introspection—she’s saying, Just gaze inward. The well might be your community, the loved ones around you, or your own soul. But the line also acknowledges that there are moments when life gets so hard that you can’t even bother to look up. I’m so prone to melancholy, and I struggle with anxiety and depression. Sometimes I live in that place. ...

Lyric put up a goofy, lighthearted, modern production of Così fan tutte right before Valentine’s Day—doubling as the college night event. Up on the top balcony, we had three flutists sitting together. It was fun (and a little too noisy, as coined by my viola friend). (Lyric is doing Salome exactly on V-day. Nothing more romantic than a woman who, to put it in modern terms, gets swiped left on by a man and responds by having him executed and head on a silver platter) ...

Classical music says, repeats and time brew creativity. What Can Musical Variations Teach Us About Creativity? By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, NYTimes, Feb 16 2026 In the “Diabelli,” you can hear Beethoven’s music get weirder and ultimately more mystical as it goes along. What is the role of time in creativity and what do we risk to lose in the age of instant A.I. solutions? Human beings have what’s called the serial-order effect: The longer we spend thinking about something, the wilder and more unusual our ideas tend to get. ...

One of my course’s selective paper referee report writing assignment. I like this paper so, here’s the referee report I wrote (lighted edited) which comes with a crisp summarization that I find in times can be quite useful This is a beautifully written, intellectually clean paper. It uses traditional OR methods and is free of fancy deep learning. Bertsimas is a titan of the field. The paper is published in Management Science at an interesting timing of 2020. ...