A hoverboard burst into flames, harming the person who bought it from a third-party seller on Amazon Marketplace and leading to a court case in which a California appeals court said Amazon can't duck out on this one. "Bottom line: Amazon — and by extension other online retailers — isn’t just a bystander when someone purchases a third-party product....
And now there's a task force trying to get the authors of novels in the Indiana Jones, Buffy, and Star Wars universes the royalties for recent sales of their books. Disney, according to author Alan Dean Foster, told him that when they bought Lucasfilm and the rights to Foster's novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope, first published in...
After being stuck at home, without movie cinemas, for well over a year, it's time to break out the big bucks for all of the extras. "The expanding appetite for an enhanced theatrical experience has given the film and exhibition business a shot of confidence and a weapon against streamers amid devastation caused by the pandemic. Yet it also...
Prigoff was a the co-author, with Henry Chalfant, of Spraycan Art, "a foundational book in the street-art field that featured more than 200 photographs of colorful, intricate artworks in rail tunnels, on buildings and elsewhere — not only in New York, then considered by many to be the epicenter of graffiti art, but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, Barcelona,...
Running an independent press isn't easy in an era of consolidation - and in a pandemic. Seven Stories' editor-in-chief: "As a business the time of greatest risk—and very possibly also of greatest reward—is right now, this year, next year. We’re on a growth curve, which has not always been the case. The marketplace for books actually grew in America...
Can tourists gain more appreciation of the real Hollywood - could the city do more (a lot more) to help them leave invigorated, and not disappointed? Check out the alley: "So many visitors to Hollywood would love to know about this unnamed space — where, in the early, exhilarating, madcap days of moviemaking, three of the greatest Hollywood stars...
Milan Ingegneria, a structural engineering and architecture firm, has won an €18.5m (£16m) bid to build and install a retractable arena floor that will allow visitors “to see the majesty of the monument” from its centre, culture minister Dario Franceschini said on Sunday. - The Guardian
Crime fiction is, roughly speaking, concerned with plot - and literary fiction (again, roughly speaking) with the interior of characters' thoughts. Sometimes, that means literary fiction doesn't deal well with the more plot-driven side of rape narratives, and crime fiction doesn't deal well with the emotional effects. So: "Especially where complex stories about sexual assault are concerned, mixing genres...
The Oscar-nominated short film A Love Song for Latasha, says filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison, was one way of figuring how to deal with the aftermath of a violent death, from the people who best knew the murdered teen. "So often we hear from elders, adults, or community activists, and I’m always really curious as to how our children process...
Britain may no longer have an empire, but at least it could have this: the title of the "true" father of cinema. "Film director and historian Peter Domankiewicz believes Friese-Greene will soon be reinstated as one of the great figures in the development of the moving image: the one who got there before Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers and...
The scandal-plagued Recording Academy is making the change after decades of complaints. Instituted in 1989, "the committees’ work began to be seen as evidence of a problematic system in which insiders rewarded their friends and punished their enemies. More recently, a number of high-profile Black artists — among them Drake, Frank Ocean and Sean 'Diddy' Combs — have suggested...
After the shootings in Atlanta, the already planned 10,000 Dreams Virtual Choreography Festival transformed into something that Asian American ballet dancers and choreographers have been missing and wanting for years - community. "There was a deep moment where we sort of were committing to building a network, building a community, taking up space, being loud, being bold. This festival...
For Oscar-winner Brie Larson, who won for Room and has since played Captain Marvel in the eponymous movie and Avengers: Endgame, it's not as if she needed a new revenue stream. But her weekly chats with herself, which now have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, are a form of self-care. - The New York Times
He was a friend and foe to museums, writes Christopher Knight. And Carolina Miranda writes, "Over the course of his life, he helped bring to fruition — in whole or in part — designs by an array of award-winning international design stars, including Richard Meier, Renzo Piano, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and, most famously, Frank Gehry. Or perhaps most...
