"Was there a connection between the sudden relevance of medieval anecdotes and an apparent increase in blackletter fonts on leftist social media? If plague humor was in, so too were ornate, eye-catching fonts derived from a Gothic style. And as platforms such as Instagram evolved last summer—becoming more text-heavy, politicized, and less about the passive consumption of lifestyle imagery—text-based...
"I think we’re witnessing, in real time, society grappling with the emergence of social media as a very powerful force. Experts who have been studying this stuff have been warning for months, if not years, that these types of disturbances could happen as a result of online platforms. And this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen social media...
Are we really just pleasure-seeking audiences looking for that instant hit of media indulgence? As the effects of lockdown and zoom fatigue have exposed, society seems to be increasingly experiencing media fatigue. - The Conversation
“History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Kirkpatrick Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.” - Wired
A look at how small groups of (properly tested and quarantined) dancers and choreographers got together (at long last!) to make work this past summer at two centers of dance in the Hudson River Valley. - The Washington Post
The vast majority, 96%, were discovered by metal detecting. Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire were identified as hotspots for treasure with more than 80 pieces found in each county during 2019. There are approximately 20,000 detectorists in England and Wales, and 348 of their discoveries were acquired by or donated to UK museums in 2019. Of the found treasure,...
"In rooms all over the internet, hospital dramas, first-responder shows, situation comedies and courtroom procedurals were having similar debates. To ignore the events of the spring and summer — the pandemic, America's belated racial reckoning — meant placing prime-time series outside (well, even more outside) observable reality. But to include them meant potentially exhausting already exhausted viewers and...
Whether or not onscreen theater feels like theater may depend on whether it offers a feeling of liveness, with all the potential for error and surprise and invention and anything-could-go-wrong-at-any-moment contingency that liveness affords. - The New York Times
"Bronze age graves, Neolithic pottery and the vestiges of a mysterious C-shaped enclosure that might have been a prehistoric industrial area are among the finds unearthed by archaeologists who have carried out preliminary work on the site of the proposed new road tunnel at Stonehenge." - The Guardian
As per fresh stats from the British Film Institute, film and TV spend on Brit shores was £2.84B for the year, down a surprisingly slim 21% on the year before. Film bore the brunt of that decline – 31% down for the year in comparison with 11% for high-end TV. - Deadline
Matty Weingast's The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns was marketed by America's leading Buddhist publisher — and hailed by many readers — as a translation of the Therigatha, a collection of Pali verse attributed to the very first community of Buddhist nuns. But as scholars familiar with the actual Therigatha got a look, they saw...
With misinformation and disinformation (here’s the difference) flourishing unchecked online, being able to discern fact from fiction is especially crucial. We witnessed the fatal violence and the humiliation on the world stage that ensues when a critical mass of our citizens can’t tell the difference between lies and truth. How can democracy, which relies on an informed citizenry, prevail...
The short answer is that it couldn't work the way it did in the 1930s: the legal and theatrical landscape then was too different. (For a start, there was no such thing as not-for-profit theatre.) But there are certainly possibilities; here are a few of them. - American Theatre
"Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial over a book examining Poles' behaviour during the Second World War, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under Poland's nationalist government. … comes in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of...
The collection of ornate medieval reliquaries is now held by Berlin's state museums; the American heirs of German Jewish art dealers, claiming that the objects were sold to the state under duress in 1935, sued in U.S. federal courts to recover them under "the international law of genocide." The SCOTUS ruling declares, "We do not look to the law...
