“US non-profit literacy agency Worldreader has beta-launched an app for non-smartphones in order to distribute free e-books into sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world.”
Month: April 2012
Catharsis In Theater: Putting Customer Service Horror Stories Onstage
“Playwright Lisa Kron mines her own life to create her often-hilarious work. She has written about being the child of a Holocaust survivor, and about her mother’s struggles with chronic illness. Her latest play deals with a struggle common to all of us – the agony of computerized customer service.”
Damien Hirst’s Artworks Are Like Junk Bonds, Says Critic
Julian Spalding: “If you want a pickled shark in a tank, you don’t have to pay the $12m Steve Cohen paid for the one selected by Hirst. You only pay that much for the artistic content that Hirst has added to it. If there isn’t any, what are you buying? … Damien Hirst isn’t an artist. His works … have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”
Damien Hirst’s Artworks Are Excellent Investments, Replies Damien Hirst
“It’s like, you say ‘sell your Hirst’. I say ‘don’t sell your Hirsts, hang on to them.’ If you look at the numbers … [art is] the greatest currency in the world.”
David Sefton Charts New Course For Adelaide Festival
“Sefton has joined the Adelaide Festival at a critical juncture. Since its foundation in 1960, the arts jamboree has been held every two years. From next year it will become, in Sefton’s word, “annualised”, raising the stakes with at least two other interstate festivals, and with Adelaide’s highly popular Fringe and WOMADelaide events.”
Case Over Negative Amazon Reviews Thrown Out Of Court
Chris McGrath, an online entrepreneur from Milton Keynes, tried to sue Vaughan Jones, 28, from Nuneaton, over a series of reviews and postings he made on the Amazon website about his self-published and little-known book “The Attempted Murder of God”.
Prominent UK Theatre Directors Call On Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre To Withdraw Invitation To Israeli Theatre
Habima is due to perform The Merchant of Venice in Hebrew during the international festival at the Bankside venue in May. It will mark the company’s first visit to the UK. However, the letter calls on Shakespeare’s Globe to withdraw its invitation so that “the festival is not complicit with human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land”.
Top UK Composers Blast New-Music Organization
The letter accuses the organisation – which is tasked with promoting new music and which was formed in 2008 following the merger of the British Music Information Centre, the Contemporary Music Network, Sonic Arts Network and the Society for Promotion of New Music – of alienating “virtually the entire contemporary music sector”. It calls for the “reinstatement of the core functions of the founder organisations without delay”.
Legalizing Crowdfunding To Invest In Startup Companies
“The Crowdfund Act, which passed the Senate last week as an amendment to the larger Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, would let anyone invest up to 5 per cent of their annual income, or $2000, in a project or firm that is listed on a crowdfunding website. People earning more than $100,000 a year would be allowed to invest 10 per cent of their income.”
Claim: WikiLeaks Didn’t Usher In New Era Of Transparency
“That basic idea — leak, publish and wait for outrage — is an old idea. The premise of this recent episode was that new technologies were basically supercharging the process. It was easier to leak, easier to publish, and by implication, more likely to produce substantial policy change. But in the grand scheme of things, the scope of these leaks was perhaps not that much larger than similar breaches in the pre-Internet.”