“On the internet, another name for confession is over-sharing, and it has become synonymous with how we use social media platforms. People can’t get a hold of me over text, but they can just read my tweets: it’s all there, every beat of my mental state.” – Sydney Review of Books
Calculating The Value Of A Single Vote (Precisely)
“If you’re in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million. That’s a very small probability, but it’s big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it’s big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world.” – 80,000 Hours
Why Americans Think It’s All About Us
“American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes “whiteness” accounts for all the evils of modern societies.” – New Statesman
Using Books – Cookbooks – To Escape, And To ‘Travel,’ Right Now
Samin Nosrat: “What has occurred to me in the last several years — and what feels particularly acute right now — is how unevenly represented different parts of the world are on my shelves.” – The New York Times
Tate Suspends Star Curator Over Guston Show Criticism
According to three sources close to the museum, managers took the decision to discipline Mark Godfrey, a senior curator of international art, after he raised objections on social media to the deferral of Philip Guston: Now, a major show which was due to include around 125 paintings and 70 drawings from 40 public and private collections. – The Art Newspaper
Want A Different Broadway? Fund A Different Broadway
These theatremakers are proposing a new way of thinking about funding and producing on Broadway, with the goal of creating more access points for BIPOC individuals interested in commercial producing. – American Theatre
The Play That Understood The Trump Era
Though researched and written during Barack Obama’s presidency, Sweat, which opened at New York City’s Public Theater days before the 2016 election, became a definitive work of Donald Trump’s. In a 2017 profile of Lynn Nottage, the New Yorker called the play “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era.” – BBC
Investing In Artists Rather Than Just Buying From Them
One huge bright spot, for example, is Soho Rep’s Project Number One, which puts artists on salary through June 2021. The artists in this program have been moved from a project-based, transactional relationship with the theatre to a more holistic, sustainable one. I believe this is an incredibly important, perhaps transformative, shift for our field to make. – HowlRound
Paris’ Legendary Shakespeare & Co. Sends Out An SOS
“We’re not closing our doors, but we’ve gone through all of our savings. We are 80% down since the beginning of the first wave. We’ve now gone through all of the bookshop savings, which we were lucky to build up, and we have also been making use of the support from the government, and especially the furlough scheme. But it doesn’t cover everything, and we’ve delayed quite a lot of rent that we have.” – The Guardian
Why Being An Optimist Might Be A Liability During COVID
Most people have a tendency to overestimate the chances of experiencing a positive (like getting a promotion), and underestimate the likelihood of experiencing a negative event (like getting robbed or sick). Typically a benign — even beneficial — human quirk, the “optimism bias” could be contributing to the spread of coronavirus according to behavioral psychologists. – Big Think
COVID Lockdown 2.0: Will Screens Still Prevail?
Futurists are predicting that the pandemic has accelerated the permanent decline of everything from watching movies in traditional theaters to standing in line at theme parks. But as we approach what is looking more and more like a second lockdown, this one timed alongside a cold, dark winter here in the upper Midwest, are those in-home screens going to dominate everything again? Is Big Tech going to once again take home all the spoils? Are we all going to let that happen? – Chicago Tribune
Thieves Are Stealing Nazi Artifacts From Dutch Museums
“Amid huge global demand for second world war memorabilia, museums in Ossendrecht, in north Brabant, and in Beek, Limburg, have been ransacked in recent days and months. In response, a series of Dutch institutions have removed their most valuable exhibits from display or implemented stricter security measures over fears that the thefts are being carried to order.” – The Guardian
David Toole, Pioneering Disabled Dancer, Dead At 56
“A double amputee whose combination of physical power and bewitching delicacy created arresting imagery on stage and TV around the globe,” — most famously at the opening ceremony for London’s 2012 Paralympics — “[he commanded] remarkable control, buoyancy and adept physical displays, sometimes giving the impression that his body was in flight.” – The Guardian
Alex Ross Speaks About His Wagner Quest
“You actually never know who is going to turn out to have an interest in Wagner. I think a lot are working composers and musicians [who] end up engaging with him on an extremely practical level. It’s not necessarily a question of dealing with these huge Wagner questions, but just, “Is there something to be learned from him right now?” – Van
Ethics And “The Lesser Of Two Evils” Strategy
In deciding whether to compromise your ideals, or whether to take a stand, you might ask yourself: ‘Will this compromise undermine projects that I’ve committed to, through which I’m actively trying to make the world a better place?’ (In which case: stand by your principles.) ‘Or are my ideals and principles simply idle, such that a moral compromise wouldn’t affect any projects actively in train?’ (In which case: act so as to promote the lesser of two evils.) – Psyche
Amazon Says It, Not You, Owns The Videos You Buy On Amazon Prime
“When an Amazon Prime Video user buys content on the platform, what they’re really paying for is a limited license for ‘on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time’ and they’re warned of that in the company’s terms of use. That’s the company’s argument for why a lawsuit over hypothetical future deletions of content should be dismissed.” – The Hollywood Reporter
The Inescapable Problem With Pop-Up Opera On A Truck
Michael Andor Brodeur: “For all the power and dramatic force opera can generate, it remains a sublimely vulnerable form, its fantasy created onstage and tenuously protected from the elements by the eggshell shield of the proscenium. Here, outside among the hum and honk of afternoon traffic, it doesn’t really stand a chance.” – The Washington Post
Hollywood Finally Starts Trying To Get Nonwhite Accents Right
“Over the past five months, major film and television studios have signaled renewed efforts to depict people of color thoughtfully and authentically. It isn’t really possible to verify the sincerity of these efforts, but the changing role of dialect coaches — and how they’re allowed to work — may offer a way to judge their success.” A reporter talks with three dialect coaches, one Black and two Latina, about the new demand for their work. – The New York Times
Wole Soyinka To Publish His First Novel In 47 Years
“The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973. Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, which will be published in Nigeria before the end of the year [and internationally in 2021], will be his third.” – The Guardian
At Last Minute, Baltimore Museum Of Art ‘Pauses’ Controversial Sale Of Three Paintings
“The decision” — made just a few hours before the gavel was to fall at Sotheby’s — “not to move forward with the offloading of paintings by Clyfford Still and Brice Marden, plus an Andy Warhol canvas through a private sale, follows weeks of controversy, which culminated in indirect censure from the Association of Art Museum Directors.” – Artnet
Postponed Philip Guston Exhibition Moved Up To 2022 After Heavy Criticism
“The National Gallery and three other major museums” — Tate Modern in London and the Museums of Fine Arts In Houston and Boston — “had announced that they were delaying the retrospective, which was originally intended to begin its tour last June, after taking into account the surging racial justice protests across the country. … Some critics said the decision to delay the retrospective amounted to self-censorship fueled by fear of controversy.” – The New York Times
France And Germany Close Theaters And Concert Halls As Second Wave Of COVID Intensifies
“Starting Friday, France will go into a nationwide lockdown with just schools and essential businesses staying open until Dec. 1, while in Germany, the new measures will close restaurants, bars, gyms and cultural spaces like theaters for one month, but exempt schools and shops.” – The New York Times
Study: Why It’s Tougher To Make It Big In Older Age
An older person might be extremely passionate, but lacking conviction that he’ll ever be any good; or a septegenarian might maintain fire in her belly, but find her passion waning. – Fast Company
Spotify Defends Promoting Alex Jones On Podcast
In public, Spotify is staying quiet about an appearance by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yesterday on its flagship podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, despite banning Jones’ own podcast last year. But in an internal email sent from a top executive, the company is defending the booking. – Buzzfeed News
Nico Muhly’s New Piece For San Francisco Symphony Would Be Impossible To Perform Live
With no live concerts since March and no prospect of restarting them soon, the orchestra commissioned Muhly to write a work specifically for virtual performance. The result is Throughline, “a piece of big-girl music that has big-girl stuff in it” (as Muhly put it) that involves the orchestra and all eight of the creative partners Esa-Pekka Salonen engaged when he was appointed SFS music director. – The New York Times