"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....
"The ballet world is filled with stories of dancers who first pointed their toes as toddlers and became professionals as teenagers. But what about those who started ballet as teenagers — and then realized that they wanted to make it their career? Their experience can be as thrilling as it is overwhelming, and also inspire a bit of panic."...
The theme park had recreated Burden's collection of street lamps that he made for the front of the LA County Museum in Los Angeles. "The court has ordered Rabbit Town to take down its Love Light installation within 30 working days since the verdict." - Coconuts
"Few sounds are as difficult to master as the rounded Os, erratic As, dropped consonants and smushed syllables of the Philadelphia accent — or Filelfia acksent, as the locals would say." Winslet says it's one of the two trickiest accents she's ever had to learn; here's a look at the hard work she put in to get it right....
The Shchukin Gallery, which sells Russian art in Paris and New York, is suing a Russian oligarch for damages and attorney fees of $950 million — in what might or might not be the culmination of an unusually tangled legal battle over three paintings by Kazimir Malevich and two by Natalia Goncharova that were, as Shchukin's attorney puts it,...
