Fortnite’s most significant achievement may be the role it has come to play in the lives of millions. For these players, Fortnite has become a daily social square – a digital mall or virtual afterschool meetup that spans neighborhoods, cities, countries and continents. This role is powered by Fortnite’s free availability, robust voice chat, cross-platform functionality, and collaborative gameplay. Accordingly, examples abound of kids, adults and families simply hanging out or catching up on Fortnite while they play. – Redef
Marcel Marceau Was A World War II Resistance Hero Who Saved Dozens Of Jewish Children
Recruited by his cousin, resistance leader Georges Loinger (who recently passed away at age 108), Marceau used his mime and acting skills to convince German and Vichy authorities that he was a teacher or youth leader taking young kids (who happened to be Jewish and incognito) to an exercise camp (that happened to be on the Swiss border). — The History Channel
Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ Is Missing — And It’s Mixed Up With The Saudi Crown Prince And The Mueller Investigation
The world’s most expensive artwork was supposed to have been on display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi four months ago, and it’s been more than 100 days since anyone (other than some Saudi royals) has known where it is. What’s more, special prosecutor Robert Mueller is investigating both the buyer of Salvator Mundi (Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman) and its seller (Trump-connected oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev, who made a $300 million profit on the sale). Reporter Zev Shalev connects the dots. — Narativ
There Were Brilliant Documentaries In 2018, And Docs Did Great Box Office. Too Bad They Weren’t The Same Films
“Go to festivals like Sundance or True/False and it feels like we’re living through a golden era of nonfiction film; turn up at your local art-house theater and you’d think the medium was nothing but celebrity-driven hagiography and cheap provocation.” — Slate
Reality Winner’s Interrogation By The FBI Becomes A Play — With Not One Word Changed
A 25-year-old Air Force vet and translator for a U.S. intelligence contractor, Winner was convicted of leaking a classified NSA report on Russian hacking of US voter databases. For The Intercept, the web site to which Winner gave the report, Alisa Solomon writes about how director Tina Satter found the transcript of the FBI’s questioning of Winner and knew she had to stage it verbatim. — The Intercept
Creating Ability-Positive Theatre for Children
“Stories that are ability-positive center around real or fictional characters with different ability statuses, not for dramatic reasons, like an abled character experiencing a new struggle, but simply to show humans, in all their complexities, who make up the fabric of our world.” Tim Collingwood, an actor-playwright-activist who identifies as having Asperger’s syndrome, writes about how he was inspired to meet the ability-positive ideal with an adaptation of The Ugly Duckling. — HowlRound
How Writers’ Estates Can Get In The Way Of Writers’ Work
Once a writer dies, their work is controlled by an estate. Of course. But that control can often result in censorship, unreasonable demands for fees, and suppression of scholarship. Pity the poor scholar/biographer searching for insight… – New Statesman
Get Ready: Musician Holograms Are Coming To A Concert Near You
The experiment has already dipped into some North American venues where the virtual likeness of deceased crooner Roy Orbison received mixed reviews a few months ago. Opera singer Maria Callas was also resurrected in a performance some critics say looked more like she was a floating ghost than a physical entity. Glenn Gould will be added to the hologram circuit in 2019, with the late Canadian pianist accompanied by live orchestras as part of a tour organized in co-operation with his estate. – Toronto Star
Millions Of Cable Subscribers Lose Access To Local Stations In Fees Dispute
Tribune, which controls 33 broadcast stations across the affected markets, had asked Charter to pay more than twice what it currently does for the same content going forward, said Charter spokeswoman Nathalie Burgos. “That is more than we pay any other broadcaster. They’re not being reasonable,” Charter said in a statement. – Washington Post
London’s Nightclubs Are Dying. Berlin, By Contrast Is Investing In Its Night Life
London’s mistreatment of its nightlife is such a tragedy. A city without clubs is a colorless place, and allowing them to disappear means marginalized communities vanish; young people flee the city, and arts and creativity suffer. With London fast becoming a playground for developers and a city that only the rich can afford it would do well to replicate Berlin’s example. – CityLab
Thinking Through The Repatriation Of African Art
Apollo editor Thomas Marks: “Restitution often feels like a disquieting concept for many Western museum-goers (myself included), for whom the values one invests in museums are unlikely to correlate with the political or intellectual projects that led to the formation of their collections.” (In other words, don’t punish museums now for what collectors did back then.) Even so, “90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa remains preserved and housed outside of the African continent.” — Apollo
A Little Chinese Arthouse Film Sets New Box Office Records — Because Its Marketers Tricked The (Now-Angry) Public
Filmmaker Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, described by a correspondent as a “dreamy pseudo-noir,” grossed nearly $38 million on its first day, nearly unheard of for an art flick in China. How? That first day was Dec. 31, and the producers marketed the film (no relation to the Eugene O’Neill play) as the perfect romantic date flick for New Year’s Eve. The overnight reaction on social media was not pretty. — Variety
Using Dungeons And Dragons To Teach High Schoolers English Lit
“Instead of assigning the same old essays about Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, [Sarah Roman] wove classroom assignments into an epic adventure for her students to play their way through. By the end of the semester, Roman said her students remembered more about the lessons and had developed relationships with the texts that they wouldn’t have gotten from a standard assignment. — WNYC (New York City)
Jack Zunz, 94, Engineer Who Made Sydney Opera House Happen
When preparing for construction of architect Jørn Utzon’s design, the Opera House’s original lead engineer could not get his structural calculations for the now-famous roof to work out, and he quit; Zunz took over and used then-new computer modeling techniques to solve the engineering puzzle. And when, during the cost-overrun-plagued construction, Utzon got tired of fighting with politicians and walked away from the project, Zunz saw it through to the end. — The Guardian
Edgar Hilsenrath, Survivor Who Found Black Comedy In Holocaust, Dead At 92
Himself a Holocaust survivor, “[Hilsenrath] chronicled the degradations of the ghettos in one novel and dared to turn genocide into satire in another, selling millions of copies and defying critics who said he was too funny, too gruesome and too vulgar.” — The Washington Post
In A Record-Breaking Week, ‘Hamilton’ Smashes Another Broadway Record
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s juggernaut grossed more than $4 million last week alone, a first for any musical. “The period between Christmas and New Year’s always brings boffo business to Broadway, but even so, the week ending Dec. 30 was the best-attended (378,910 seats filled) and highest-grossing ($57.8 million) in Broadway history. An astonishing 28 shows grossed over $1 million” — including, most unusually, five straight plays. — The New York Times
Cleveland Orchestra Musicians Have New Contract
The three-year agreement “includes 2-percent annual increases in minimum weekly compensation, a higher level of seniority pay for long-term members, and annual increases to retirement, life insurance, and long-term disability benefits.” — The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
The Water’s Rising, The Buildings Are Decaying, And The Inhabitants Are Leaving — Can Venice Still Be Saved?
Salvatore Settis, former Director of the Getty Research Institute and author of If Venice Dies, says maybe, if authorities start following policies they’ve shown no real interest in. (Meanwhile, the directors of an artificial intelligence project called the Venice Time Machine take the opportunity to plug their work.) — Apollo
Al-Qaeda Was Finally Chased Out Of This Yemeni City, But Its Hip-Hop Dancers Are Still Forbidden To Dance
When the port city of Mukalla was finally liberated from Al-Qaeda, “[these] five Yemeni hip-hop dancers thought their problems had ended. … But last month Yemeni security forces briefly detained the five members of the WaxOn band, broke their equipment and only released the dancers after they had signed a document saying they would stop dancing hip-hop in public.” — Reuters
Major Cultural Figures In China’s Xinjiang Province Are Disappearing Into Uyghur Prison Camps
“Since April 2017, an estimated one million of Xinjiang’s 11 million Uyghur population” — including most of its Uyghur artists and writers — “have disappeared into what the government calls ‘re-education’ camps, without recourse or documentation, where they are reportedly tortured into denouncing Islam and their Uyghur identity, and accepting Communist Party rule and Han Chinese dominance.” — The Art Newspaper
Artist Ai Wei Wei On The Need To Strengthen Human Rights
“If we truly believe in values that we can all identify with and aspire to – a recognition of truth, an understanding of science, an appreciation of the self, a respect for life and a faith in society – then we need to eliminate obstacles to understanding, uphold the fundamental definition of humanity, affirm the shared value of human lives and other lives, and acknowledge the symbiotic interdependency of human beings and the environment.” – The Guardian
Exploring the Four Stories
For over a year now, I’ve been stewing on and adapting the independent work of E.F. Schumacher and Ken Wilber (citations below), both of whom explore and explain what a “whole” view of ourselves and our world might look like. As I’ve unfolded it (literally) for a few groups and close colleagues, it now seems useful to unfold it for all of you for your reactions. — Andrew Taylor
The weight of being erased
Identity is the hottest topic in American theater these days, just as immigration is the hottest topic in American politics. But Heather Raffo’s Noura, a drama about a family of Iraqi Catholics who have fled to America, is nothing like the issue-driven, stridently politicized plays about these subjects with which our stages are currently clogged. — Terry Teachout
Chamber Music Collective Brings Classical Music To Teenagers In State Custody
Reporter Cintia Lopez joins members of the Boston ensemble Sarasa for one of their performance/workshops at a Massachusetts Department of Youth Services facility. — WBUR (Boston)
The Stage Does A Full Survey Of West End Theatres’ Bathrooms: There Just Aren’t Enough
There especially aren’t enough stalls for women. For the average West End venue, a full house would mean the intermission would need to be an hour long to give every woman the chance to relieve herself (and that’s assuming each one needs only 90 seconds). — The Stage