Yearly Archives: 2021
How “A Housewife From Winnetka” Started Collecting Data About Dance
The data project shows that, despite recent improvement, works performed by major ballet companies are still overwhelmingly choreographed by men. - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
Homer As A Manufactured Construct
Faced with uncertainty surrounding the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancients rushed to fill in gaps, in essence producing a biography...
Preserving Mexico’s Old-Time Popular Cinema — And Getting Some Respect From The World For...
"Had they not been rescued from a dusty storehouse seven years ago, the original negatives of hundreds of Mexican movies featuring the likes of...
Has Amazon Really Changed Literature?
Spotify-like Kindle Unlimited subscriptions have made fiction into an “‘always on’ utility” that prioritizes “serial plenitude over singular encounters.” - The Baffler
Turns Out Poland Is A Hotbed Of Sacred Choral Music
Paweł Łukaszewski, now his nation's leading living composer, has written a lot of good music for choir. So have his Polish colleagues and predecessors...
Media Companies Believe The Blockchain Will Transform Their Businesses
With crypto and blockchain, the movie and entertainment industry is poised to reinvent its business functions, facilitating secure, transparent, and traceable transactions across the...
Victorian “Penny Dreadful” Pulp Novels Actually Contributed To Improving British Society (No, Really)
The cheap, cheesy horror stories became so popular, especially among older children and teens, that they were arguably a bigger factor in spreading literacy...
Why Have 17,000 People Lost Their Jobs In Australian Universities?
Before it happened, we in the sector viewed the prospect of such an outcome as intolerable: a Rubicon we would never allow to be...
James Ivory, Still Working At 93, Says His Life As A Gay Man Has...
The director half of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking duo (and the oldest person ever to win an Oscar) says he and Ismail Merchant weren't...
Seven Rules For The Culture Wars
In culture wars, both sides like to refer to self-evident sources of ‘the truth’ – such that ‘every sensible person must surely be able...
When Rudy Giuliani Tried To Shut Down The Brooklyn Museum
In a new memoir, Arnold Lehman, who was director of the museum at the time, looks back at the culture-war media circus that broke...
COVID Killed Quite A Few Dance Companies, And The Survivors Are Scared
As dance companies are returning to the stage, the ghosts of those that no longer exist haunt the field. … Dance advocates see the...
Why People Really Cancel Their News Subscriptions
The Nieman Journalism Lab asked its readers who had cancelled to tell them why, and hundreds did. Ideological or political bias was cited, but...
The Behemoth Of Broadway Licensing Companies May Be Up For Sale
You may not know of Concord Theatricals, but in the past five years, it has bought up Samuel French, Tams-Whitmark Music Library, and rights...
Off-Broadway’s Leading Awards Eliminate Gender From Acting Categories
The Lucille Lortel Awards will honor outstanding lead performer and outstanding supporting performer in a musical and in a play, thus cutting the number...
“Utterly Astounding”: Well-Preserved Roman Statues Found On Route Of Britain’s Planned High-Speed Railway
"Statues of a Roman man, woman and child have been uncovered by archaeologists at an abandoned medieval church on the route of the HS2...
NBCUniversal Loses Half A Billion Dollars On Its New Streaming Service
"Comcast on Thursday reported $230 million in revenue and a $520 million adjusted loss related to NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock in its third-quarter earnings...
Study: Sell An Idea By Focusing On “Why” Or “How”?
Should she focus on why her idea is useful or should she instead promote a more concrete focus on how the idea works when...
Why Reading Is No Substitute For Travel
Although reading affords a way of learning about the world, it cannot transmit the richness of sensory experience. Can reading about a glacier convey...
The Problem With Writing Workshops (and How To Fix Them)
Craft, Matthew Salesses explains, is a series of expectations, and until those expectations are made explicit, they will enforce the status quo by concealing...
The Personal Cost Of The Noise Around Us
According to the World Health Organization, noise exposure and its secondary outcomes such as hypertension and reduced cognitive performance are estimated to account for...
China’s Web Novels Are Changing The Way We Read
Having built a thriving multibillion-dollar web fiction industry at home, Chinese web novel platforms are increasingly looking to sell their stories — and the...
How Mort Sahl Changed Comedy And Flamed Out
He became a comedian’s comedian—venerated by other comedians, especially those old enough to know that they wouldn’t be doing what they were doing if...
George Butler, The Documentarian Who Made Arnold Schwarzenegger Famous, Dead At 78
It was via Butler's 1977 film Pumping Iron that the charismatic Austrian bodybuilder came to the world's attention. Notable among Butler's other docs were...
Campus Threats To Academic Freedom? Maybe Not So Much
None of this is to say that higher education shouldn’t be vigilant about threats to academic freedom and free speech. But let’s not give...