It happened in the winter of 1938 in Paris, as he was walking home from a movie with friends: a pimp named Prudent (yes, really) badgered them for money. (Later, in court, Beckett asked his attacker why he did it, and Prudent replied, “I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”) – The Independent (UK)
2019, The Year Lesbian Culture Finally Went Viral
“In 2019, there was a paradigm shift in how social media, and pop culture broadly, perceived gay women. It was as if lesbian culture — its memes, language, and stories — was suddenly mainstream.” (However, writes Jill Gutowitz, “As the self-identified Overlord of Lesbian Twitter, I may have a skewed vantage point here.”) – Wired
The New Yorker’s List Of Top Cultural Moments Of The 2010s
From Zadie Smith to Christian Marclay’s clock to Beyonce and Clive James – the decade was a series of flashes. The New Yorker
Five Historians Claim Errors In The NYTimes’ Groundbreaking “1619” Project. The Times Responds
Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it. – New York Times Magazine
Why High Resolution Audio Has Had Such A Hard Time Finding Takers
Leaving people’s personal abilities to distinguish high sonic quality from low sonic quality out of this conversation, there is a virtually insurmountable issue with mass adoption of hi-res audio: acoustic environment. – Shelly Palmer
End Of An Era For Penguin Books
The last British owner of Penguin, Pearson, announced that it was selling its remaining stake in Penguin Random House, the book publishing joint venture it formed six years ago with Bertelsmann, the German media group to rival Random House. – MSN
Johanna Lindsey, Bestselling Romance Novelist, Has Died At 67
Lindsey started writing romance on a whim, and she wrote more than 60 novels – and sold more than 60 million books. – The New York Times
Dancing On Ice Is About To Make History By Finally Having A Same-Sex Couple In The Show [VIDEO]
Uh, congratulations? That’s very advanced of Dancing on Ice, if we lived in, say, 1994? But of course, someone has to be first. – BBC
A Trove Of Family Recipes Reveals A Centuries-Long Secret
If you know the recipes date back to Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition, does that tell you what the secret is? “One of the most unusual recipes … uncovered [was] a sugary dessert called ‘chuletas,’ the Spanish word for pork chops. ‘It’s designed to look like a pork chop,’ Milgrom explains, ‘but it’s really made from bread and milk.’ Basically, it’s French toast that’s fried in the shape of a pork chop and dressed up with tomato jam and pimentos.” – NPR
Not Even ‘Star Wars’ (Not Even ‘Avengers,’ Not Even Anything) Can Save This Year’s Box Office
But let’s put it into context. “Just four percent down? At a time when the Star Wars franchise expanded into live-action television for the first time with The Mandalorian on Disney Plus? ‘Hallelujah,’ you can almost hear film executives saying.” – The New York Times
To This Headline, We Say ‘Please’
The headline: “Was this decade the beginning of the end of the great male white writer?” (#NotAllGreatMaleWhiteWriters, of course.) “Though few publications have reached parity, the overall trend has been a shift in that direction. Even the dismal New York Review of Books stats (27.1% women in 2018) have shown an almost twofold improvement over 2010 (16.2%).” Well, uh, wow? Let the 2020s double that kind of not really twofold improvement, at least, maybe. – HuffPost
Jeanette Winterson Is Worried About AI
The author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and 10 other novels, along with much nonfiction and several children’s books as well, Winterson says, “People always say ‘let’s get the technology out there and lots of people will benefit in time.’ Well, no, because by that point, the technology will change and the rich will control it completely. The world is moving too fast for the trickle-down effect.” – The Guardian (UK)