The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally. Getting this history right means telling a different story about where our international political order has come from—which in turn points the way to an alternative future. - Boston Review
He was one of postwar German's most prominent architects, and had been the country's only living Pritzker Prize winner. "His most revered works resemble jagged concrete mountains, among them the town hall in Bensberg in western Germany that he shaped as a grand fortress and crown of the city. So too the massive pilgrimage church in Neviges, near Düsseldorf,...
The old critics used familiar terms of analysis—irony, structure, symbol . . . The new theorists traded in logocentrism, “the Other,” undecidability, “infinite paradigm of difference.” Their vocabulary reduced the audience for academic criticism. American undergraduates couldn’t understand it, but so what? - First Things
" is using powerful tools to curtail the creative freedom of Bollywood — in particular the influence of Muslims, who have an outsize presence in the industry. The measures pushed by the Modi government include indiscriminate tax investigations, trumped-up accusations against actors and directors, intimidation and harassment in response to certain movies and TV shows, and the chilling rap...
It’s unknown how many books are affected by the bug. The number of ratings per book lost seem, without any further information, to be random. Authors took to Twitter with their worries, because for authors, the loss of reviews and ratings is in no way a simple error or a minor issue, as the platform is a powerful tool...
The just-announced project They Are Us, to be written and directed by New Zealander Andrew Niccol (writer and co-producer of The Truman Show, writer-director of, among others, Gattaca and Good Kill) and starring Rose Byrne, focuses on the aftermath of the 2019 mass shooting and the national campaign led by Prime Minister Ardern to ban assault rifles in the...
A virtual YouTube is a channel that follows an animated or virtual character instead of a real-life person. These virtual YouTubers (VTubers for short) first became popular in Japan in the mid-2010s, and now have spread around the world. - Slate
"When she took the position in 2007, she was the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra. She was, it seemed certain then, the avatar of a new generation of women on important podiums. … But when she departs this summer, the field will go back to the way it was before she came: 25 major orchestras...
Last summer, back home in Wales after completing his 16-year term in Raleigh, he suffered what turned out to be a three-day stroke that severely impaired the use of his right arm and leg. After a month's hospitalization and six months of physical therapy, though he can't hold a baton, he is back working with the Orchestre national de...
" that the position of Artistic Director is held by far more men than women, while the position of Executive Director is much more equitably distributed. However, in both Artistic and Executive Director roles, men are compensated at a higher rate than their female counterparts." (One prominent detail: Peter Martins earned way more than anyone else — though one...
"The Edinburgh festivals have been offered millions of pounds in emergency funding in the face of widespread fears they may never fully recover from the severe impacts of the COVID pandemic. The Fringe, international and book festivals, which help make up the world’s largest annual arts season, have been forced to very significantly curtail this August’s events, the second...
The Dear Respected Leader has "called it a 'vicious cancer' corrupting young North Koreans' 'attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviors.' His state media has warned that if left unchecked, it would make North Korea 'crumble like a damp wall.' After winning fans around the world, South Korean pop culture has entered the final frontier: North Korea, where its growing influence has...
Art historian Gregory Buchakjian did his Master's thesis at the Sorbonne on the art collection of the Sursock Palace, where he identified two unattributed canvases as the work of the 17th-century Italian painter. With the decades-long turmoil in the Lebanese capital, Buchakjian and the rest of the world forgot about those two paintings — until the catastrophic explosion in...
Says actor Gabrielle Brooks, one of four co-founders of the Mawa Theatre Company, "Shakespeare remains a staple of British theatre. He's still the most produced playwright in the world and I think if we want to tackle diversity, representation and inclusion, then why not start with the Bard himself? … If we can, as black British women, embed ourselves...
Empathy, of course, is a two-way street, and we humans don’t exhibit a whole lot more of it for bots than bots do for us. Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual...
