ISSUES

"This historic progression", said culture minister Roselyne Bachelot, "will bring to +15% the lasting increase in the means which have been allocated to culture since 2017, excluding public broadcasting and civil pension charges." - Euronews

Current and former employees are using terms like "mass exodus", "freefall", and "climate of fear" to describe the situation at the central London venue. The turmoil comes in the wake of reports of racism and other discrimination there. - The Stage

Singapore has followed its dismissal of Yale's liberal education by introducing a Foreign Interference Act that, "under the guise of defending national sovereignty, will enable the government to designate any independent media outlet as a foreign agent and to censor its content." - Salon

Games like The Sims can get boring, so content creators add virtual challenges to keep themselves, and others, engaged. - Wired

"I couldn’t help but think about how the approaching opening of the Academy Museum — a space that will celebrate the work of these below-the-line craftspeople — is set against the backdrop of Hollywood’s labor strife with the union that represents these same artisans." - Hyperallergic

Google and Apple opened offices in Russia. Then Putin pressured them to delete his opposition's Smart Voting app - and they caved. "This episode is a powerful reminder that old-fashioned force can decisively tighten a state’s grip on the web." - Wired

But did the copyright ever belong to the artists who wrote and drew the characters? - The New York Times

Mark Pullinger finds that, while venues' staff may be masked themselves, they're not requiring patrons to have face coverings or proof of vaccination (to be clear, they're following the lead of Boris Johnson's government), and he looks with envy at safety measures in Europe and New York. - Bachtrack

Archaeologists report that the destruction, circa 1650 BC, of the city of Tall el-Hammam was caused by a large meteor disintegrating in the atmosphere — a blast, 1,000 times larger than Hiroshima, that would have fit the Biblical description of fire raining on the evil cities. - Smithsonian Magazine

"(The delta variant surge has) worsened a host of additional issues, like technology and language barriers and pandemic-stoked xenophobia. Community organizations fear that the diminished patronage and insufficient government support will force many longstanding businesses to close, which could accelerate gentrification." - Slate

‘We’ve had thousands of years to get good at but virtual connection is new, and we need to do some interrogation of the form to see how we get that same catharsis, buzz and deep connection that draws us to theatre.’ - ArtsHub

The difference is not in case numbers; it's in state government policies. New South Wales (Sydney), governed by the conservative Coalition, has relatively laissez-faire rules (and higher COVID caseloads), while Victoria (Melbourne), governed by Labor, has been unusually strict with lockdowns, masking rules, etc. - The Guardian

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. - Unherd

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, "censorship (is) no longer about nudity, gore, or promiscuity. It (has) firmly set its sights on whether (a) narrative matched the right-wing Hindu nationalists' narrative." - Slate

On Instagram, the tag #darkacademia now has over 1 million posts, and Grazia has named the aesthetic as autumn 2021’s biggest trend. The TikTok generation has keenly embraced the tweedy cosiness of scholarly life. - The Conversation