For nine months in 1969-70, Native American activist John Trudell made weekly broadcasts from the shuttered prison in San Francisco Bay, programs that aired on Pacifica Radio stations in California, New York, and Texas. They brought the injustices faced by indigenous Americans to the ears of more than 100,000 listeners — and earned Trudell an FBI file that ran to more than 1,000 pages. — Narratively
National Museum Of Brazil Opens Its First Exhibition Since Disastrous Fire
The show, housed at another Rio museum, the Palace of the House of Money, features fossils found in Antarctica. Eight of the items on display, including a pterodactyl bone, were recovered from the museum’s ashes, the other 152 in the show were borrowed from other collections. — Yahoo! (AFP)
How Amazon Creates Instant Best-Sellers
To promote these works, it has tools other publishers can only dream about owning, including Amazon First Reads and Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s e-book subscription service. Together, they reach an estimated 10 million or more customers who can read offered titles with a few keystrokes. “They aren’t gaming the system,” literary agent Rick Pascocello said. “They own the system.” – The Wall Street Journal
The Daunting Task Of Preserving Auschwitz
In the museum’s storage areas and display rooms, there are some 3,800 suitcases, along with 5,000 toothbrushes and 110,000 shoes and shoe remnants. There are also mountains of human hair, prosthetic limbs, eyeglasses and other things left behind by the prisoners. It all amounts to a huge number of artifacts given the museum’s storage capacity — but relative to the vast number of victims, it isn’t much. – Der Spiegel
Is It Problematic To Present All-Male Plays?
White, black, young and old: this is what an inclusive theatre looks like. That is absolutely what theatre should aspire to, but it does not mean that works of art should not tell stories that are rooted in specific communities. – The Stage
Boy With Allergy Denied Enrollment In Theatre Program, Igniting Conflict Over Access
The conflict that ensued over how the theater could accommodate Mason Wicks-Lim’s allergy eventually grew into a legal battle that created a rift in the community, highlighting the social struggles that people with food allergies often contend with, even as they fight for equal access. – The New York Times
Anne Midgette: I Was Wrong About Movie Music And The Concert Hall
“I saw ‘A New Hope’ with both the NSO and the BSO in September and found that the experience confirmed something I had started to suspect: As a classical music critic, I was clueless. That is: While I liked John Williams’s music just fine when I first saw the film at age 12, by the time I had attained legal adulthood, laden with a cargo of acquired snobbery about the superiority of Western civilization, I had learned, and bravely parroted, that ‘film music’ was somehow beneath me.” – Washington Post
What Happens When The “End Of History” Proves To Be Wrong
Francis Fukuyama had a great idea. His “end of history” suggested a way of thinking about what was now happening to the world and synthesized the work of a number of philosophers. “The only flaw in the brilliance of The End of History was that its thesis turned out to be wrong, and wrong in a huge way.” – The New Republic
LA MoCA Will Close Its West Hollywood Satellite
“The Museum of Contemporary Art announced Wednesday that it will close its Pacific Design Center location next month after exhibiting architecture and design at the West Hollywood satellite for more than 20 years. MOCA will continue an architecture and design program, but at its Grand Avenue and Geffen Contemporary locations in downtown L.A.” — Los Angeles Times
Women Writers: Busting The Preconceptions For Commercial Success
Ann O’Loughlin: “All women writers face an uphill struggle to have their work recognised in the same way as their male counterparts, but for those of us writing bestselling commercial fiction, there is a mountain to trudge up every time.” – Irish Times
UK Toughens Age Restriction Ratings On Movies
“It’s enough that a 12-year-old knows that a rape has taken place. They do not need to see it, no matter how discreetly it’s filmed.” – BBC
Ottawa’s National Gallery CEO Steps Down After Ten Years
“I’m especially proud of pumping up the volume on all things indigenous. We’re playing a leadership role in the world here in Canada [recognising indigenous work]. We talked about that since I first got here.” Mayer says it was an “emotional moment” when the museum opened its Canadian and Indigenous Galleries in June 2017, covering 5,000 years of creative output in the region, from First Nations art and objects to contemporary work. – The Art Newspaper
Is Amazon Killing Incomes Of Writers? No, Protests Amazon
Amazon is frequently blamed for not just disrupting the way people buy books, but for making it difficult for writers to make a living. Now the company is fighting back, taking aim at an Author’s Guild report last week that detailed a catastrophic drop in author incomes. – The Guardian
New European Internet Content Law Will Be A Disaster For The Internet
“Taken together, these two rules will subject huge swaths of online expression to interception and arbitrary censorship, and give the largest news companies in Europe the power to decide who can discuss and criticise their reporting, and undermining public-interest, open-access journalism.” – Electronic Frontier Foundation
Baltimore Symphony Musicians’ Contract Has Officially Expired
“A contract between management and musicians expired Tuesday night as they continue to debate whether shrinking the BSO’s season from 52 weeks to 40 weeks a year is the best path forward. The development is unlikely to have any immediate, public effects. … The dispute, however, is seen as a threat to the orchestra’s continued role as one of the nation’s preeminent orchestras.” — Baltimore Business Journal
When Trees Are Part Of The Design, Is It Okay To Cut Them Down?
Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Performing Arts has a need to attract new audiences (and don’t we all). So there’s a plan to refresh the complex’s campus, including an idea to cut down a grove of trees and replace it with a lawn. But Mary Louise Schumacher wonders if destroying the trees – an important design element of the current campus – is really in the best interest of the community. – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Universities Are “Moneyballing” Students To Figure Out Who Will Succeed
The dropout rate at American universities has been high. What to do? Use mountains of data to find better ways of predicting who will do well when they get in. And no, it’s not just looking at whether you got good grades (duh)… – Politico
When Our Social Media Randomizes Our Memories, It Distorts Our Sense Of Self
Philip Kennicott: “When we remember our lives authentically, we ask a fundamental question: Why did I remember this thing, at this moment? The “Why now?” question gives memory its meaning. Facebook randomizes and decontextualizes memory and detaches it from our current self.” – Washington Post
Will The Oscars Ceremony Really Be Better Off Without A Host?
Kyle Buchanan: “One of the academy’s oft-stated priorities is to trim the telecast to a slim three hours, and with no monologue nor a host to keep cutting back to, the proceedings should at least be shorter. But will they be better? … I think we’re still underestimating the power a host has to shape the telecast in ways both noticeable and not.” — The New York Times
Last Words — What Do People Really Say Before They Die?
“We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.” — The Atlantic
Lecturing About Proust In A Soviet Prison Camp
Jozef Czapski was a Polish officer fighting the Nazis in 1940 when he and his fellows were captured by the Red Army and shipped to a gulag (and thus barely avoiding the Katyn Massacre). To pass the evenings, the officers took turns giving lectures about what they remembered best, and Czapski chose Proust. Here’s why. — The New York Times Book Review
How An Old Jewish Doctor Had A Stroke And Became An Underground Rap Star
Dr. Sherman Hershfield was a rehab doctor from Beverly Hills, who, after his stroke, started speaking in rhymes. He started recounting the Holocaust in rhyme on the bus, and a passerby suggested he visit an open-mic rap night in South Central. He was 40 years older and 40 shades whiter than anyone there, but he ended up befriending KRS-One and became “Dr. Rapp.” — The Atlantic
American Alliance Of Museums Launches Program To Diversify Museum Leadership
“The project, ‘Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion,’ will be supported by $4 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alice L. Walton Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The funds will go toward training and resources over the next three years that will help museum leaders better reflect the communities they serve.” — The New York Times
What It’s Like When *You* Own The Wall Banksy Spray-Painted
“After a Banksy mural appeared on his Port Talbot garage last month, Ian Lewis found himself facing a ‘very, very stressful’ battle to protect the artwork from thieves and vandals. Here, four people share their own, very different experiences of being ‘Banskied’.” — The Guardian
‘Uncomfortable Art’ And #QueerMuseum: Alternative Museum Tours Are Catching On In Britain
Dan Vo leads groups on #QueerMuseum tours of Cambridge museums and the V&A, pointing out things like an Antarctic explorer’s scandalized notes on male-on-male penguin sex and a “gender-fluid” statue of Lucifer. Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art” tours through the likes of the British Museum point out the ways colonialism pervades the collections. — The New York Times