“No one now can go on insisting on the usual beneficial effects of literature without taking serious and systematic account of Currie’s arguments. Not to do so in future will count as intellectual negligence.” – Notre Dame Philosophical Review
Want Certainty? (It Might Not Be Good For You)
Philosophers have long warned that this desire for certainty can lead us astray. To think and learn about the world, we must be willing to be uncertain: to accept that we don’t yet know everything. – American Scholar
Want A Subscription With Top Seats To Broadway Shows At Philly’s Kimmel Center? Give Them $1,000
“The Kimmel Center is instituting a mandatory $1,000 donation for access to the best seats in its Broadway series. That’s $1,000 up front, before the cost of the tickets themselves. The new policy goes into effect now for new subscribers and in the 2022-23 season for existing ones.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Game Of Thrones: The Musical?
OK, we’ll be honest, not a musical. A play. Or two? Seven? Hm. However, why Game of Thrones? “It was an epic, at times beautiful, show and all these attempts to reanimate its corpse can feel like a cheapening of the original experience. But there’s something else: Why not host a stage production from literally any other author or TV creator out there? There are so many!” – Wired
Hey Literature, Women Can Stutter Too
There’s truly, in the American literary canon, only one – Merry Levov, of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. What gives? And what do literary writers believe stuttering represents in the first place? – LitHub
The Subway Can Be Hilarious
Just ask these stand-up comedians, who have been doing sets on trains for months. There are tickets, but then there are also random subway riders. And is it official? Hm. “The show had the chaotic air of something that could get shut down at any moment by a strict police officer who was not in the mood for a joke. A few people sipped beers, but everyone wore face coverings, making reactions to jokes harder to decipher. Still, the comics said they could tell from crinkled eyes and body language.” – The New York Times
Why The Duke Isn’t Coming Back
Listen up, Bridgerton fans, blame streaming (and the focus switch of each Bridgerton book, from which the series draws). At Netflix and other streamers, “the goal is to draw paying subscribers and there’s little incentive to extend even the most popular shows for more than a few years. In that case, Soltman said, it wouldn’t be surprising to have a one-year contract for a limited series or a show with a plan to focus on different characters in each go-round.” – Los Angeles Times
Why Are Digital Ads So Obnoxious While Digital News Sites Keep Failing?
Like the so-called “pivot to video,” a lot of the industry was built on a house of cards that one might, with some justification, call lies. Starting new publications seemed so easy on the internet. “From the start, though, there was a problem. The super-low costs of entry and the lack of geographic limitations that were key to the explosive growth of digital journalism were also key to its undoing. These new publications had no way to recreate the profitability and stability that the old regional monopolies had made possible.” – The Atlantic
Indoor Events Like Movies And Theatre May Return To California This Month
Restrictions both from public health officials and venues will be in place. “Venues can also choose to separate people into sections based on their vaccination status. Those who are fully vaccinated could sit shoulder-to-shoulder, but they still must wear masks.” – Los Angeles Times
The Pleasure Of Writing Actual Letters In The Era Of Email And Social Media
“A precise feeling of fondness accompanies the receipt of a letter from someone you care about. There are as many shades of this feeling as friends in the world. Yet I sometimes leave a letter unopened for days, not knowing if I am ready to read it. A friend I still write to confessed the same thing. I wonder what we think those sealed letters contain.” – LitHub
What Of Our Radically Reimagined Cities Will Remain Transformed, Post-Pandemic?
Public space is different now than it was 15 months ago. Streets have been turned to outdoor eateries and pedestrian malls; Paris removed tons of street parking and converted the Rue di Rivoli into a biking haven. Will any of this decentralization of the car – and concurrent centralization of pedestrians and bikers – remain? – Fast Company
Composer Constance Demby Has Died At 81
Demby was a composer of electronica and New Age music. Her 1986 album Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate sold more than 200,000 copies. “Pulse magazine named it one of the top three New Age albums of the decade and called it ‘a landmark, full-length electronic symphony reminiscent of Baroque sacred music with crystalline effects that take you out of the realm of everyday experience.'”- The New York Times
Ovation Awards Snafu In Los Angeles Sparks Exodus Of Theatres From LA Stage Alliance
The list of things that went wrong at the Ovation Awards is too long to list – though the venerable East West Players did on social media – but the result of mispronouncing an Asian American actor’s name, posting the picture of a different Asian American actor to identify the first actor, and much, much more, is clear. “The next day, East West revoked its membership in the Ovation Awards presenter, LA Stage Alliance, and urged other local companies to do the same. More than two dozen did, including the Center Theatre Group, the Geffen Playhouse, Deaf West Theatre and the Pasadena Playhouse.” – LAist
Myanmar’s Latest Internet Shutdown Will Damage Everyone In The Country, Not Just Pro-Democracy Activists
The internet is as much part of our utilities as water and electricity. The shutdown in this globally linked economy is destructive, and only part of that is planned: “In addition to stifling speech, communication, and digital rights, the indiscriminate internet blackouts are destroying Myanmar’s economy, halting pandemic-related remote schooling, and disrupting health care.” – Wired
Regular British People Got A Slight Lockdown Escape Through Writing Music
One 53-year-old paramedic said, “I’d never written a song before. … But I came home from work and said: ‘I need to write this down.’ I sat down, wrote some lyrics and put together a melody on my guitar. Putting it down on paper… I definitely found that helped.” – BBC
Just When We’re Tired Of The Whole Panini, Theatre On Camera Is Improving
Sort of. “Still, how these works fare on practical levels — such as WiFi reliability and technical mastery of a visual medium — reveals the Internet as bumpy terrain for a field that breathes more naturally in shared public air.” – Washington Post
She Never Planned To Be An Actor, And Now She Has An Oscar Nomination
Yuh-Jung Youn didn’t have acting on her life plan. “The self-taught thespian never envisioned a life in the performing arts. Her international breakthrough seems to her, like everything else along the way, fortuitous. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ she said. ‘Most people fell in love with the movies or fell in love with theater. But in my case it was just an accident.'” – The New York Times