TheChek News Flow

Change can seem slow. A new building rises, one floor at a time. A new subdivision breaks ground with two homes, and then four. A new transit line is planned, and years pass. What it all adds up to can be hard to see.

But zoom out — way out — and it’s clear that the last decade has brought remarkable transformation to many communities. It's visible from 400 miles above: Vast new exurbs have been carved from farmland, and once-neglected downtowns have come to life again. The tech industry has helped remake entire city neighborhoods, and it has dotted the landscape with strange new beasts, in data centers and fulfillment hubs.

To grasp the scale of this decade of change, The Upshot worked with Tim Wallace and Krishna Karra from Descartes Labs, a geospatial analytics company, using a tool that has itself evolved significantly over this time: satellite imagery. With its growing power and precision, we can see both intimate details — a single home, bulldozed; a tennis court, reinvented — and big patterns that recur across the country. Here, we show some of the most consequential changes over the last 10 years, as seen from above.

---> https://nyti.ms/2MGztH2

Worth a look to the pictures on the website

Philharmonic to play new version of Strauss’s Radetzky March

When the Vienna Philharmonic embarks on its annual rendition of the Radetzky March at its New Year’s Day concert, a connoisseur of the music of Johann Strauss Sr may notice something slightly different.

Alerted to the Nazi connections of the arrangement of the piece the orchestra has played for decades, the philharmonic will this year play a new version for this year’s concert at Vienna’s storied Musikverein, which will be broadcast live to 92 countries. 

The old version was arranged by Austrian-born Leopold Weninger, a former member of the Nazi party who also made popular arrangements of the party’s anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied.

The orchestra’s decision to ditch the old version underscores the legacy of Austria’s Nazi past and, 75 years after the end of WWII, the country’s slow reckoning with it. 

After the philharmonic was reminded about Weninger’s Nazi background, it sought to codify a modified version of the arrangement which has evolved over decades, spokeswoman Claudia Kapsamer told the Financial Times. 

“The idea was and still is to bring joy to the listeners and not to remind anyone of some war or Nazistic propaganda or ideas,” she said.

The Radetzky March, first performed in 1848, was dedicated to the memory of Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky’s victory in the First Battle of Custoza, at the start of Italian Risorgimento. The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose 1932 novel Radetzky March chronicles three generations of a family during the late days of the Habsburg empire, called the tune “the Marseillaise of conservatism”, a reference to the French call to revolution which later became that country’s national anthem. 

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the philharmonic’s Jewish musicians were fired. Five of the musicians perished in concentration camps, while two died in Vienna as a direct result of deportation attempts. Another nine were driven into exile, according to research published on the philharmonic’s website.

By 1942, almost half of the orchestra were members of the Nazi party — far higher than the 20 per cent in the Berlin Philharmonic. 

The Nazis began the tradition of the new year concert in 1939 and the Radetzky March was first played at the 1946 edition. While the concert programme varies each year, the encores are almost always the same: the Radetzky March and Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube waltz. Both compositions are seen as unofficial Austrian anthems.

The New Year’s Day concerts were part of the Nazi regime’s “propaganda-by-entertainment strategy”, said historian Oliver Rathkolb in a study.

They were so important that Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels allegedly endeavoured to adjust Strauss’s baptismal record in Vienna — because it noted that the composer was partly Jewish. 

In postwar Austria, the Vienna Philharmonic was the “most distinctive example” of the difficulty of removing Nazis from cultural life, wrote Mr Rathkolb in a different study.

Ms Kapsamer said Weninger’s version of the Radetzky March had been the only one in existence for a large orchestra because the original arrangement had been for fewer musicians.

She said the new arrangement had evolved over decades, with handwritten changes passed down by generations of musicians. Daniel Froschauer, the philharmonic’s chairman, asked that these changes be incorporated into the orchestra’s own edition of the score for 2020.

Studio held one-third of year’s domestic movie market, a first for any company, as other franchises struggled

A few major misfires kept Hollywood from achieving great expectations at the 2019 box office, but one powerhouse studio set a new standard for dominance.

Walt Disney Co. DIS -1.36% ended the year as the film industry’s unprecedented leader with a slate loaded with nostalgia-inducing blockbusters, but rivals failed to sell the tickets needed to make 2019 the historic year some predicted it would be. A handful of expensive films from established franchises, or starring some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, fizzled at theaters in the U.S. and Canada.

Those flops included “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Gemini Man,” both distributed by Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures; Sony Corp. ’s “Men in Black: International”; and “Dark Phoenix,” an X-men movie from Twentieth Century Fox, which Disney acquired this year.

These disappointments helped drag the 2019 domestic box office down about 4% from 2018, according to media-measurement company Comscore, which expects a full-year total of about $11.4 billion. Last year, ticket sales rose to a record $11.9 billion.

World-wide ticket sales are likely to exceed $41 billion this year, with overseas grosses climbing to a record of more than $30 billion, according to Comscore data.

Disney became the first studio in modern times to command one-third of Hollywood’s box-office take, with a 33.1% share of the domestic market through Dec. 29. Six of its films passed the $1 billion mark on a global basis, including “Toy Story 4,” “Frozen 2” and “Captain Marvel,” another first for a studio.

Disney’s “Star Wars” sequel “The Rise of Skywalker”—marketed as the end of the narrative arc that began with the franchise’s first film in 1977—is also poised to exceed the $1 billion mark after a late-2019 release. The movie already has made more than $724 million globally.

“Disney delivered,” said Eric Handler, an analyst at equity-research firm MKM Partners. Disney’s “Avengers: Endgame,” released in April, surpassed 2009’s “Avatar” as the highest-grossing movie to date, with $2.8 billion. As “Endgame” closed in on the record in July, Disney released an updated version of the movie with additional footage, helping to nudge it past “Avatar.”

Even though 2019 could edge past 2016 to finish as the second-best box-office year, “it’s not the record year we once hoped for,” Mr. Handler said. “It ended up below expectations,” he added.

And while box-office revenues in the U.S. and Canada are expected to surpass $11 billion for the fifth consecutive year, the number of people going to the movies has stagnated. Grosses have been buoyed by rising ticket prices, which in nearly a decade rose 21% to an average of $9.11 in 2018, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. The trade group hasn’t said what the 2019 average was. In the record-setting 2018, theaters sold 120 million fewer tickets than in 2009.

The growing popularity of subscription offerings for movie theaters kept average ticket prices lower, said association spokesman Patrick Corcoran, and might have increased attendance.

In 2020, rival studios are likely to regain some of the market share they lost this year to Disney, which might have a hard time matching 2019’s list of record-setting successes. The studio’s slate boasts a few Marvel titles, but the remakes it expects to distribute lack the firepower of this year’s lineup, which included “Aladdin” and “The Lion King.”

Separate from Disney’s dominance, this year was the first time since 2000 that five R-rated movies ranked in the domestic top 20.

AT&T Inc. ’s Warner Bros. had the most success with R-rated titles, releasing both “Joker,” a brooding spinoff starring Joaquin Phoenix as the notorious Batman villain, and Stephen King’s “It: Chapter Two.” Comcast Corp. ’s Universal Pictures also scored in the horror genre with its release of “Us.” Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s ode to Tinseltown, “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood,” also performed well for Sony Corp. ’s Sony Pictures, despite its long running time and mature narrative.

“Joker” became the highest-grossing R-rated film to date at the global box office.