Too often schools are tasked not simply with caring for their students but with repairing an entire social order. Schools can do so much we do not ask of them, like developing solidarity, fostering political responsibility, and ensuring a love of learning for its own sake. Yet the one thing we are most insistent they accomplish, the ensuring of “equal opportunity,” is something even the best school is simply not capable of achieving. – Hedgehog Review
Hobby Lobby/Museum Of The Bible Deal To Return Looted Antiquities Is Unfair To Iraq
“Exploitative and degrading” is how one Iraqi newspaper described the current draft Memorandum of Understanding between the Iraqi government and the Museum of the Bible along with the family-owned chain store that funds it. “The Daily Beast has consulted with experts in Iraqi archaeology, international law, and art crime about this document. Here are some of the problems they identified with it.” – The Daily Beast
A New Shakespearean Theatre Recreation In Connecticut?
The theater in Stratford, Connecticut, modeled on Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London, burned down in January 2019 as the result of arson. The theater building had not hosted an indoor performance in decades, though the surrounding lawn has continued to be sacred ground for Shakespeare fans, with performances by a summertime Shakespeare Academy and local outdoor Shakespeare troupes as well as community festivals. – Hartford Courant
The Racial Anxiety Behind Music Reaction Videos
Sure, they’re joyful, but … “the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air.” – The New York Times
Need Some Reading Direction?
Here the map of Black-owned bookstores in the U.S. And the recent uptick (well, massive increase) in business “is both ‘lucrative’ and ‘bittersweet,'” say some owners. – Oprah Magazine
How To Keep The Memory Of WWII Alive Now?
It’s 2020, so video games, of course. “History games can spark interest in learning more, says Bob Whitaker, a professor of History at Collin College and host of the podcast History Respawned, where historians talk about history-themed video games.” – Time Magazine
The Complexities Of Black Speculative Fiction Can’t All Fit Under Afrofuturism
The term was coined, by a white writer, in 1993. It might have been a good start, but there are issues: “It lacks room to conceive of Blackness outside of the Black American diaspora or a Blackness independent from any relationship to whiteness, erasing the long history of Blackness that existed before the centuries of violent oppression by whiteness — and how that history creates the possibility of imagining the free Black futures.” Hence the terms, coined and popularized by writer Nnedi Okorafor, Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Getting Anti-Black Language Out, While Retaining The Core Ideas And Beauty, In Shakespeare
This may not be easy, and a lot of theatre artists may not want to think about it – but a Google Doc can help. “If there’s an instance where the word ‘slave’ does harm and the word ‘knave’ doesn’t, I think you can change it. I don’t know if that word did harm to Shakespeare’s audiences, but it can to ours. In an instance like that, I believe that making a substitution is actually closer to honoring Shakespeare’s original intention.” – Howlround
Rewriting Irish Dancing’s Weirdly Strict Gender Rulebook
Trans dancers are challenging the conventions. Hayden Moon says it’s not easy: “I’d spent years learning to be high on my toes and not make any noise and never let my heel touch the ground, doing all of these very pretty kicks and leaps and jumps. And then all of a sudden I was getting told by my dance teacher that I wasn’t loud enough.” (And that’s the least of the challenges he’s faced in the Irish dance world in Australia.) – Dance Magazine
Why Do Writers Get So Little For Movie Rights?
How realistic is it for writers to get rich from selling adaptation rights? “It’s just not,” says Joanna Nadin, whose YA novel Joe All Alone was adapted into a Bafta-winning 2018 television series. “It’s unrealistic to think any aspect of writing can make you rich.” – The Guardian
Meet The Musicians Who Are Going To The Scenes Of Tragedies to Play
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Twenty volunteer musicians, all Black and Latinx string players from in and around Milwaukee, make up the Black String Triage Ensemble. When a tragedy occurs, they bring their instruments to the scene and play a concert. They go to shootings, suicides, overdoses, house fires, car accidents. They organize their concerts around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. – Chicago Tribune
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What Ancient Statues Tell Us About Universal Facial Expressions
Previous research on universal facial expressions has centered largely on similar responses by people from different modern communities. These studies seems to suggest that individuals across cultures classify emotions in similar ways—but the fact that many non-Western communities have interacted with Western cultures (often through colonialism) raises the possibility that participants share surveyors’ understanding of facial expressions not because they’re universal human knowledge, but because they were introduced to the culture in recent history. – Smithsonian
As Movie Theatres Reopen, Audiences Weigh The Safety Calculation
As high-profile titles like Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic “Tenet” and “The New Mutants” gear up to hit the big screen, marking the first major films to open since theaters were forced to close in March, audiences are faced with the choice of whether or not to return to the movies. Sure, they’re desperate for some entertainment and eager to do something more social after months of relative isolation, but do the risks associated with indoor activities justify a few hours of big screen escapism? – Variety
Was Last Summer’s ‘South Pacific’ At The Aspen Festival Racist?
A number of students playing in it thought so — and they felt dismissed, stonewalled, and sometimes threatened when they brought their concerns to festival management. (One student, not long after meeting with administrators, got a message from his private teacher saying, “You need to apologize for the sake of your career.”) – Van
Powell’s Books Says It Will Stop Selling Through Amazon
“For too long, we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon’s business on our communities and the independent bookselling world,” Powell wrote. “We understand that in many communities, Amazon — and big box retail chains — have become the only option. And yet when it comes to our local community and the community of independent bookstores around the U.S., we must take a stand.” – Geekwire
Applause Is The Crucial Thing We Lack In Performances Without An Audience
“So reflexive is applause, it can be easy to forget how powerful it is, what makes it important enough to fake” in performances and sports events without live audiences. “Applause is a marvel of atonal expressiveness. A spontaneous projection of unity. And much like the art it responds to, we are worse off without it; it’ one of those things we do to make us less afraid of each other.” – The Washington Post
Bill Arnett, Dead At 81, Brought Unknown Southern Black Artists To The World’s Attention
Among the artists whose works he bought, exhibited, and donated to museums (and to some of whom he paid regular stipends) were Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, Bessie Harvey, Mose Tolliver, and the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama — and he would compare their art to that of Rauschenberg, Johns and de Kooning. His efforts did not go without criticism, though, including accusations of white paternalism and enthusiasm to the point of pushiness. – The New York Times
Old Dutch Master Painting Stolen For Third Time In 32 Years
Frans Hals’s Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer (1626) was taken by robbers from a small museum south of Utrecht in 1988 and was not recovered for three years; it was pilfered again in 2011 and was missing for six months. At around 3:30 Wednesday morning, thieves got it again. Amsterdam-based Arthur Brand, the world’s only star art detective, says it was likely “stolen to order.” – BBC
Major Broadway Theater Operator Sues Insurers For Coronavirus Payments
“Jujamcyn Theaters, the operator of five Broadway houses, has sued its insurers for denying it millions of dollars that the theater company says it deserves as payment for the losses suffered during the monthslong coronavirus pandemic shutdown.” – The New York Times
Much-Lauded Black-Run Jazz Label Faces Up To A Complicated History
The campaign that was intended to celebrate the partnership of Gene Russell, a Black pianist and producer who died in relative anonymity in 1981, and Dick Schory, a White percussionist and arranger who earned millions during RCA’s golden era, has instead revived a debate over the romantic mythology surrounding the label’s history. It has also brought to the surface the complicated, decades-old web of business dysfunction that kept these albums from being properly released over the years. – Washington Post
Finally: Arts Organizations Have Some Fun
One of the primary benefits of this pandemic is that artists and arts organizations were all forced to experiment – even though they didn’t feel ready. This wide-spread spirit of experimentation is itself an achievement. I don’t care that it took a collective “spaghetti at the wall” approach; we really needed a shakeup. – Hannah Grannemann