The Lyon-based artist Em Emem (a pseudonym, of course) uses mosaics to fill in gaps in street infrastructure, but also to make them gorgeous. "'I'm just a sidewalk poet, a son of bitumen,' he says. His work involves filling potholes and cracked walls on city streets with beautiful mosaic designs, a process he calls 'flacking' – a play on...
Broad, whose money came from homebuilding and insurance empires, truly changed L.A. "Dogged, determined and often unyielding, he helped push and prod majestic institutions such as Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art into existence, and then, that done, he created his own namesake museum in the heart of Los Angeles." - Los Angeles Times
Dukakis was well-known as a working actress in the theatre when she took a role as the mom in Moonstruck. Then she won an Oscar for that role, and then she was in Steel Magnolias, Tales of the City (four series over several decades), and so much more. She never gave up theatre, though, and even played the (lightly...
"Each Permanent domestic stamp, designed by Stéphane Huot, features a dynamic image of its subject in performance. Karen Kain almost breaches the borders of the three-by-four-centimetre stamp as she flies through the air as the Black Swan in a 1977 photograph by Andrew Oxenham. Fernand Nault is equally airborne in a 1947 outdoor photo shoot on Montreal’s Île Sainte-Hélène."...
"Some factors that helped the studio persevere? A landlord who is postponing the studio’s $22,000 monthly rent payments, PPP loans totaling more than $110,000, the launch of a subscription-based platform for dance tutorials, and the studio’s nearly 30-year legacy and global brand with franchises in cities including Las Vegas, Nashville and Shanghai." - Los Angeles Times
Video streaming — sometimes a throwaway in the company’s earnings announcements — was this time a centerpiece. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who is shifting to executive chairman this summer, noted that streaming has risen 70% compared with the same time a year ago. Prime Video, which has recently marked its 10th anniversary, served film or TV titles to...
"Complete rejection of expertise not only makes little epistemic sense (for there is no doubt that expertise exists); the complexities of the modern state make trust in others’ expertise indispensable. On the other hand, unqualified deference to those in positions of power and privilege vitiates the basic principles of democracy." - Boston Review
"Here we are in 2021 and many still think they can affect change by pulling their business from the very people who helped get the statewide and national results they claim to want. Apparently the way to get people to vote the way you like is to yank them around, threatening their ability to pay their mortgage and feed...
"Everyone else might be taken, but the effort to be ourselves is the surest path to being just like everyone else, especially in the context of a highly commodified and surveilled culture where we always seem to be on stage. If some person or organisation claims to be concerned with authenticity, you can be almost certain that they’re conformist...
Josquin des Prez was, in his day and for more than a century after his death in 1521, the most influential and most revered composer in Europe. He demanded, and got, the highest salary; he was the first to have an entire volume of printed music devoted to his work alone; he was the first composer about whom anecdotes...
“Canadian authors will have fewer houses to present their manuscripts to,” explained executive director Kate Edwards. “A culture of ‘blockbuster’ publishing will become more entrenched. All of this will increase pressure on independent presses who already struggle to compete in a concentrated market dominated by large global companies.” - The Walrus
"The tone of the letters consistently is that of a man still aflame after a violent argument, gradually subsiding into a hot puddle of guilt and shame from which now and then, in a renewed fit of rage, he surges up into yet another outburst of rancorous self-justification. On practically every page we seem to hear the slammed door,...
“The city keeps investing in these temporary shelters, but everyone acknowledges that there’s nowhere to move to from these shelters. And if it’s not permanent housing, it doesn’t actually solve homelessness,” says Shayla Myers of the Legal Aid Foundation of L.A. “Everyone says we need all of these options, and there’s no question that’s true. But at some point,...
"The origins of blackface minstrelsy are much older than most people know, with deep roots in the English medieval and Shakespearean theatrical traditions. Understanding the often-forgotten medieval roots of blackface might help us to end old performance traditions and to create new ones." - Smithsonian Magazine
In July of 2019, Microsoft invested a billion dollars, which allowed OpenAI to create a supercomputer with two hundred and eighty-five thousand C.P.U. cores, ten thousand G.P.U.s, and four hundred gigabits per second of network connectivity per server. Microsoft claims that it ranks in the top five supercomputers in the world, processing more than twenty-three thousand teraflops per second....
