Today is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. To celebrate, employees at Sealed Air, which manufactures $4 billion of the stuff annually, get their own sheets to play with at their desks.
Milton Babbitt, the American composer who believed that those in his line of work, if serious, shouldn’t concern themselves with the average listener, has died. There is perhaps some truth to Babbitt’s thinking, which, like his music, followed Schoenberg’s dictum that “if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”
Book report: The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters, is sublime. Part ghost story, part social history, part English period piece, it also manages to be both a great work of literature and a gripping page-turner of a novel. Highly recommended.
