“The budget outlines a new 10 per cent tax on book sales in Newfoundland and Labrador, which would be added to the current five per cent federal GST. … If implemented, Newfoundland and Labrador would become the first province in Canada to have its own tax on books.”
Did Rousseau Have ADHD? (Sure Looks Like It)
“In his autobiography, Confessions, the description is clear: ‘To understand the full extent of my delirium at this moment you would have to know how easily my heart is fired by the least thing and with what energy it plunges into imagining the object that attracts it, however worthless this object may sometimes be.'”
Here’s Where This Year’s Presidential Candidates Stand On The Arts
“The choice in November’s general election will no doubt be much clearer when it comes to support for arts, but the current field of two Democrats and three Republicans offers a rainbow of cultural policies. Here’s a rundown of some of the key points from each candidate’s political career.”
How Whit Stillman’s Films Humanized The 1%
“Medieval morality plays had vice; Marxists, the bourgeoisie; and my English professors, dead white males. (They also worried about power, brainchild of Foucault’s bald pate.) But these days, we cross our index fingers in the face of privilege. … No one, however, has done more to humanize poor old two-dimensional Privilege than the filmmaker Whit Stillman. … Unsurprisingly, this seems to trouble his critics.”
Witches Are Back In Popular Culture – And This Could Be Why
The Crucible on Broadway, the film The Witch, the TV series Salem and The Devil You Know — “Just as Arthur Miller pulled McCarthyism from Early Modern American witch obsessions, the applications of witchcraft narratives to the current day are manifold. … So what’s the most globally pervasive contemporary witch hunt you can think of? What forms of radicalism has it helped catalyze?” (The questions are not just rhetorical.)
Are Humans Really Smarter Than Chimps? Not On Everything, And That Drives Some Humans Bananas
Frans de Waal: “We have trouble looking at animal intelligence by itself, always asking, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?’ Since there is only one answer that satisfies us, people watching [the chimp] Ayumu’s videotaped performance on the internet couldn’t believe it, saying it must be a hoax. … [Some] American scientists felt they had to go into special training to beat the chimp.” (They failed.)
What It’s Like To Work As A New York Times Obit Writer
“All the writers start from scratch with their sources, calling friends and family caught in the midst of funeral planning, scanning yellowed clippings from the paper’s ‘morgue’ archives, and acting as their own fact checkers in the race against the evening’s deadline.”
James Franco Convinces Jerry Saltz He’s A Real Artist
“In almost four hours of conversation in Los Angeles this winter, the artist and critic met and talked honestly about why the art world has been so hostile to Franco and other celebrities who try to enter it – and what drives Franco to continue, hostility be damned.”
Violinist Breaks Her Foot, Plays Concerto Anyway – Standing Up
“‘It happened at like two o’clock,” she said. ‘I had a soundcheck at four.’ There wasn’t time to go to the doctor, and besides, she was pretty sure what a doctor would say: ‘You need to ice it, and elevate, and medicate: three things I couldn’t do at that moment.'”
A Hard-Hitting Radio Soap Opera For War-Torn Syria
“If the soap was about anywhere other than Syria, you might call the storylines melodramatic, but as the scriptwriter Mahmoud points out, all his plots resonate with Syrians because they’re just hearing their own story.”
YouTube And Musicians – Marriage From Hell?
“We should think of YouTube and the music industry as being locked in a marriage that is equal parts mutual dependency and mutual hatred. It’s less angels and devils, more George and Mildred.”
Replica Of Palmyra Arch Created In London’s Trafalgar Square
“The scale model of the Arch of Triumph has been made from Egyptian marble by the Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA) using 3D technology, based on photographs of the original arch.”
Atlanta Makeover: A City Refreshes Its Arts Leadership
“Not only the High Museum, the Atlanta Symphony, Atlanta Ballet but also the Cobb Energy Centre just lost its managing director and is looking for a new person. That’s a major, major change. From 2008 to 2012, the arts took a huge hit. And in the past three years, there has been a renaissance or reinvention of the arts. People in Atlanta are coming back, but they want to see something new and different.”
‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Play Is Back In Monroeville – Under New Management
“Harper Lee, the author who first gave life to the story and became this town’s most famous resident, died in February. The play, which is an adaptation of her novel, is being produced this spring for the first time by a nonprofit she” – and her controversial attorney, Tonja Carter – “created, not the local museum that had relied on it for revenue.”
US Supreme Court Rules Google Books Project Covered By “Fair Use”
“The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers’ claims. That decision today means Google Books won’t have to close up shop or ask book publishers for permission to scan. In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.”
20 Ways For Nonprofits To Be Nicer To Job Applicants And Stop Treating Them Like Crap
“There are tons of tips out there for job applicants about how to stand out and improve their chances of securing that dream job. Today, let’s bring some balance. We in the nonprofit sector pride ourselves on equity, community, and social justice. And yet we still have some terrible habits that we need to break.”
Court Orders La Scala To Rehire Ballerina Fired In Anorexia Controversy
“Mariafrancesca Garritano was sacked unfairly in 2012, the Court of Cassation concluded in a definitive ruling on a case that turned the spotlight on eating disorders in the high-pressure world of professional ballet.”
The New Yorker Becomes The First Magazine To Win A Pulitzer (Two Of Them, In Fact)
The Feature Writing prize went to Kathryn Schulz for “The Really Big One,” about the potential for a massive earthquake in California; the magazine’s television critic, Emily Nussaum, took the award for criticism.
New Yorker TV Critic Emily Nussbaum Wins Pulitzer; Twittersphere Jumps For Joy
As it happens, Nussbaum is the second female television critic in a row to take the prize, which went to The Los Angeles Times’s Mary McNamara last year.
Literary Pulitzers Go To Books That Had Been Overlooked (Until Now)
For instance, “literary types spent most of the fall arguing about A Little Life in the pages of various literary reviews [while] neither the London Review of Books nor the New York Review of Books has touched” this year’s fiction winner. (They will now.)
Yes, Of Course ‘Hamilton’ Won The Pulitzer For Drama
The other two finalists were Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Stephen Karam’s The Humans.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.18.16
Cultural strategies, structures, and subtexts
Theater journal has just published my book review of Peter Frumkin and Ana Kolendo’s book on cultural construction projects: Building for the Arts: The Strategic Design of Cultural Facilities (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 2014). … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2016-04-18
Threadgill wins Pulitzer for Zooid and cheers for his career
The Pulitzer Prize for Music has been earned by Henry Threadgill, composer, bandleader and reedist, for his expansive and in-depth explorations of polyphonic improvisation with his quintet Zooid, the suite stretching over two cds In for a Penny, In for a Dime … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2016-04-18
Guggenheim Quicksand: Why Are We in Abu Dhabi?
The Guggenheim Foundation ought to cut its losses and pull out of its Abu Dhabi misadventure. There’s no point in trying to analyze the salvos in the latest hostilities and breakdown of talks between … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-04-18
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Former Director Of The Knoedler Gallery Defends Herself
“I have never deliberately done something wrong, which is to say knowingly. It doesn’t mean I haven’t…done things that I would like to take back…Mistakes happen. Since the beginning of mankind we have seen mistakes with thinking something is, and it isn’t.
The Man Who’s Transforming The Family Sitcom
“When a colleague kept comparing the colleges they had attended, Barris recalls, ‘I was like, ‘It doesn’t really matter where you went to school, because right now I’m looking at you across the table. So kudos to Harvard! Because we make the same money.’ ‘”
Dear Hollywood: What Is UP With The Yellowface?!
“Which is worse: Hollywood not casting Asians to play Asians or Hollywood pretending that Asians don’t exist in the first place?”