Ahmed, whose performance in The Sound of Metal has been nominated for countless awards this season, doesn't prefer the easy life. When he was a kid, he says, "I wanted to perform in some way, but I didn’t think it was viable. Teachers told me I should be a barrister, because I was always arguing with them." - The...
Gabriel began working at RCA when she was a student at Temple University, testing records for manufacturing imperfections. And she didn't leave. "Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited."...
Ma Rainey, Mank, and others win on the first night of the British Academy Film and Television Arts awards, when mostly the crafts are recognized. - Variety
We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public...
Blockchains may radically transform many facets of business life, but they’re a tool particularly well suited for collaborations. Put simply, blockchains are digital ledgers where several people have joint control over the shared information — a feature that makes them ideal for situations where trust and information sharing are important. The technical design of blockchains makes it virtually impossible...
"This last year, with the pandemic and its disruptions in terms of routine, discipline, just ordinary day-to-day activities, the body doesn't know itself at the moment. So I can't tell you what I can ask it to do until I refamiliarize myself. And I'm in the process of doing that. … Whenever I've finished one of these big projects,...
In a world in which flamboyance and style have long determined how an architect becomes a star, this approach – doing nothing – is an act of resistance. The fact that, 30 years into their career, Lacaton and Vassal have now been awarded the built environment’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize is a revolution. As the jury put it, Lacaton...
"Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It is still common for people to talk of “guilty” cultural pleasures—TV, dance music—about which no one has felt guilty in decades, and to apologize for them with an enthusiasm that looks a lot like pride. But the pretense of guilt is merely there to increase our pleasure; it adds...
"I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness. It does that, essentially, on an individual level. A work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes...
Experts have felled 59 of the trees at the Villefermoy forest in the Seine-et-Marne region, and a further 26 oaks will be donated by four state-owned forests managed by the National Forestry Office. The massive restoration effort will need 1,000 French oak trees in total. - Artnet
Paul McCartney invented the details of her life as recounted in the famous Beatles song, but he found her name on a gravestone in a village church cemetery on the outskirts of Liverpool that he and John Lennon used to take shortcuts through. Yes, the grave is still there, and we do know a bit of her actual biography....
"Culture has been a potent driver of Chicago for decades, of course, but this still is a unique moment, especially with the new availability of federal money. Hence it’s high time to develop some new cultural spaces and both the private and the public sectors will need to get involved. This change of emphasis, which seems to me inevitable,...
The natural world has always been a key subject of Japanese verse, and there's even an established body of words — kigo — that categorize various phenomena by season and thereby evoke particular emotions. For instance, referring to a typhoon in a poem is supposed to anchor it in the autumn. But Japan, like many other places, is now...
“Gainsborough had a great deal of interest in musicians and likened a picture to a piece of music, once writing: ‘One part of a Picture ought to be like the first part of a Tune; that you can guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the Tune, and so I’ve done.’” - The Guardian
"After seeing yet another situation where a longstanding Yahoo-owned website is shutting down, I'm left to wonder if the problem is that the motivations for maintaining sites built around user-generated content simply do not favor preservation, and never will without outside influence. How can we change that motivation? Today's Tedium, in a follow-up to the post we wrote...
