Q: “You’ve said that when you look at yourself in the mirror you see a guy who got fired three times. Do you think there will ever be a point when you’ll look in the mirror and see the dude who changed the game with Between the World and Me?”
A: “No, because that remains to be seen. And the game could get changed back.”
British Museum In Court Disputing Nearly $1M Tax Bill
The museum is contesting a tax bill from the local council of the London borough of Camden for £720,000. The council maintains that revenues from the museum’s two restaurants and gift shop should be taxed at for-profit rates.
Writing About Perfectly Invisible People: Middle-Aged Women
“A middle-aged woman who’s not preoccupied with handling herself or taking care of someone else is a dangerous, erratic being. What is she up to? And what’s the point of her being up to anything? She has no children, she has no family, the only thing she has is her own life and what good will that do anyone.”
The 17th-Century Philosophers You Won’t Learn About At Oxford
“Conway engages with the key debates of European philosophy of the period — the relationship between mind and body, the nature of matter, the attributes of God — and with the key philosophers. What she also does is bring concepts into the treatise from the Lurianic Kabbalah, the sixteenth-century school of Jewish mysticism.”
What Paved The Way For Modern Secularism? 16th-Century How-To Books
“There was a good reason why technical manuals were so often titled ‘books of secrets’. Not only did they reveal closely guarded trade practices, they assumed a world in which there no longer are ‘secrets’ in the sense of mysterious hidden forces in nature.”
How Did Voltaire Get Rich? By Rigging The Lottery, Repeatedly
“It was once said of Voltaire, by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that ‘our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix. The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris … By the time d’Argenson made his remark, in 1751, Voltaire had amassed a fortune. He owed it all to a lottery win. Or, to be more precise, to several wins.”
Dancer Convicted Of Acid Attack, Now Out Of Jail, Wants To Return To Bolshoi
“Pavel V. Dmitrichenko, the dancer released from prison after being convicted of engineering an acid attack that exposed the hidden intrigues of the Bolshoi Ballet, asked to meet outside the theater where he had so spectacularly fallen from grace, and where he already envisions his return. With the famous facade glowing pink in the soft light of a summer evening, Mr. Dmitrichenko looked around and pronounced himself entirely at home.”
Can Locking Our Phones In Pouches At Shows Really Save Us From Ourselves?
Tom Moon: “This is about artists setting the terms of engagement for a performance. Which is their right. We probably don’t think of it that way, in part because the Internet and smartphone technology has fundamentally altered the dynamic between artist and audience. Not just in terms of copyright abuses, which remain a huge problem, but also in terms of attention abuses. Which are more insidious, more accepted as part of the new digital lifestyle, and thus harder to control.”
A Music Store Closes And It’s Tempting To Write The Definitive Eulogy
“Critics can and have read Other Music’s bow-out as representative, in an allegorical way, of any number of bigger Ends: the End of music as a physical medium to be collected and doted over, the End of curated off-line retail, the End of curation, the End of the East Village, the End of New York. Most of those Ends—whether real or imagined—have already been eulogized so aggressively that to revisit them now seems plainly indulgent.”
The Video Game Experience As Art
“What’s the mechanism through which a game can give you an artistic experience?” When we watch a movie or read a novel, he said, we consider characters’ dramatic conflicts and imagine what we’d do; he wanted to replicate that in a game, in which the player could actively participate.
American Charities Are Being Undermined (And It’s A Growing Problem)
“Donor-advised funds have been a bad deal for American society. They have produced too many private benefits for the financial services industry, at too great a cost to the taxpaying public, and they have provided too few benefits for society at large. When we consider their overall effect, we see that rather than supporting working charities and the beneficiaries they serve, they have undermined them.”
Hollywood’s Sequels Barely Even Bother With The Story, They’re About Milking The Brand
“Sequels have always been a financially driven proposition, and it’s not a revelation that some of them are churned out like sausage … But for the 15 years or so of the post-Star Wars blockbuster era, the bottom-line pragmatism behind sequels did not erase another priority: narrative.” But that was then: “This summer’s sequels are not, for the most part, story continuations but brand extensions.”
A Place Where Typewriters Still Hang On
“The manufacture of typewriters in India might have come to a halt, but in Goa, as in the rest of the country, there are plenty of machines still going clackety-clack. Government-run offices, village schools, and other rural administrative offices still use typewriters for work such as drawing up contracts or bills.”
Technology Will Make The World Better, Right? Not Always! (We’ve Gotta Change The Way We Think About This)
“Is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest technology will solve social problems—and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive, and misguided? Can we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work closely with the people they’re trying to help in order to build sociotechnical systems that address hard problems?”
Luminato Festival Finds A Striking Venue And An Organizing Idea
“In its 10-year run, Toronto’s Luminato Festival has had lots of Whats – celebrated events such as last year’s Apocalypsis, the Joni Mitchell tribute of a few years past, shows by performance artist Marina Abramovic and many other first-rate attractions. But it’s always lacked a Why – a central idea or theme that has been able to knit together its varied and heterodox concerts, art installations, theatrical works and all-around happenings.”
Banff Center Reinvents Itself
“The name change is part of a rebranding endeavour that includes a new look (a monochrome colour spectrum inspired by snow and accented by red; the capital “A” in Banff resembling a mountain peak) and strategic plan. Among other things, the plan will see a heightened emphasis on public access, indigenous programs and training for cultural leaders.”
How NPR Unlocked A Ton Of Data About How Its Listeners Listen
“The largest age group listening to NPR One is 25- to 34-year-olds, according to NPR, with 40 percent of listeners under 35. More than a third of users who answered NPR surveys said they never or only occasionally listen to broadcast radio.”
What’s Truly *New* About The Internet
Virginia Heffernan: “Speed and expansiveness, to start. On expanse: The population of our ether – users of cell tech and wifi – is now just about coextensive with the population of the earth. This is fathomless by most minds. And speed: The illusion of near-absolute compression of time and space on the Internet is an illusion so beguiling we are virtually powerless to refuse it as real, except for short periods and with great mental or spiritual focus.”
Pakistan’s Leading Sufi Singer Shot Dead By Taliban
“One of Pakistan’s most famous and respected musicians, celebrated for devotional songs from [the] centuries-old mystic tradition [of qawwali], has been shot dead by Taliban gunmen in Karachi.”
Remember When You Could Call For The Correct Time? You Still Can, And People Do
“The U.S. Naval Observatory still offers a time-by-phone service. (Call 202-762-1401 today, and you’ll hear a pleasant ticking sound followed by the announcement of the exact time, delivered in an old-timey-broadcasting voice.) Not only does it still exist, but people still use it.” Adrienne LaFrance looks at why.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.22.16
“Commercial in Confidence”: National Gallery of Victoria Upholds MoMA’s Secrecy on Loan
In my post last week spotlighting the lack of transparency about the financial terms (collegial loan or money-making rental?) of the Museum of Modern Art’s planned dispatch of some 150 masterworks for temporary display at …read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-06-22
Snapshot: Alexander Calder “performs” his miniature circus
Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927, a 1955 film directed by Jean Painlevé, in which Alexander Calder demonstrates the workings of the miniature circus that he constructed in 1927. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-06-22
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David Gockley – An Opera Pioneer Reflects On The State Of The Art
“While his substantial contributions are being lauded widely — with an all-star “Celebrating David!” gala earlier this month at the War Memorial Opera House here, the publication of a coffee-table book about his career, and numerous articles and accolades — Mr. Gockley was in an introspective mood during a recent lunch in which he discussed the significant challenges ahead for opera.”
Inside A Broadway Show Failure (Case Study)
Four shows flopped this spring at a total loss to their investors. Here, based on interviews with a variety of Broadway figures, is an autopsy report of sorts for “American Psycho,” “Disaster!” and “Tuck Everlasting,” all of which closed in recent weeks, and “Bright Star,” which wraps up on Sunday.
Hearing A Rock Concert Inside A Volcano (And Getting Airlifted Out By The Icelandic Coast Guard)
“As we waited we were assured that it has been 4,000 years since Thrihnukagigur’s last eruption, and that the guides were ‘pretty certain’ we’d continue to be safe from any fiery deluge at least through Moreno’s final bow.”
An Internet Porn Epidemic – Should We Be Concerned?
“According to ongoing research by Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University (NYU), the numbers are high and rising quickly. She estimates that 36 per cent of internet content is pornography. One in four internet searches are about porn. There are 40 million (and growing) regular consumers of porn in the US; and around the world, at any given time, 1.7 million users are streaming porn.”