The project, called Field of Vision, “sees independent documentarians around the world investigating concerns close to Poitras’s own practice: surveillance as well as political boundaries, hidden social conflicts, and the layers of urban space. … Field of Vision will produce about 50 short-form or episodic nonfiction films a year. Its first season debuted online September 29.”
Month: October 2015
‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ Has Become A Text For Academics
“Hundreds of scholarly books and articles have been written about Buffy‘s deeper themes, and an entire academic journal and conference series – appropriately called Slayage – is devoted to using the show and other [Joss] Whedon works to discuss subjects such as philosophy and cultural theory.”
Museum Directors Release Plan to Help Provide Safe Havens for Endangered Antiquities
“Under the protocols outlined by the Association of Art Museum Directors, owners whose works are endangered because of terrorism, violent conflict or natural disasters could request that the items be held by a member museum until conditions improved enough for their safe return. Once transferred, these works would be treated as loans, an arrangement that would assuage those concerns that the pieces would never be repatriated.”
Handicapping This Year’s Nobel Prize For Literature
The Journal‘s Speakeasy blog looks at the six contenders currently topping Ladbrokes’s list, five of whom have been mentioned for years and one – the current leader, as it happens – whose name will be unfamiliar to many of us.
The Misty Copeland Effect: Has She Already Helped Change Professional Ballet?
Says Washington Ballet artistic director Septime Webre, “It’s really taken some time for directors to feel comfortable talking about this subject, but now the topic is out in the ether. Misty is a big part of that. And people aren’t just talking now, they’re really trying to find ways to do something about it.”
‘No Satisfaction Whatever At Any Time’ – When Agnes De Mille Met Martha Graham Over A Soda
“Feeling that critics and the public had long ignored work into which she had poured her heart and soul, De Mille found herself dispirited by the sense that something she considered ‘only fairly good'” – her choreography for Oklahoma! – “was suddenly hailed as a ‘flamboyant success.’ Shortly after the premiere, she met Graham ‘in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda’ for a conversation that put into perspective her gnawing grievance and offered what De Mille considered the greatest thing ever said to her.”
Twitter Mulls Expanding Size of Tweets Past 140 Characters
“There has been ongoing debate at the company about what to do about the limit, a feature unique to Twitter that has created its own lingo and quirky style of brevity but has had its obvious constraints. Users have come up with workarounds to the character limitation by attaching screenshots of longer text or by linking tweets together in a so-called ‘tweetstorm.'”
140 Characters Are More Than Enough
“Twitter’s character limit is more than a pragmatic concern – it’s an aesthetic and cultural one, too, and it defines the tone and nature of the platform itself. Twitter is a thing constantly in motion, and changing the nature of the tweet will correspondingly change the nature of the tweetstream for the worse.”
Nein – Deconstructing The Aphorisms Of The Twitterverse’s Favorite Depressive Philosopher
“For more than three years, Jarosinski’s followers (currently numbering over 117,000) have enjoyed his steady stream of extremely witty tweets. Sometimes light and playful, sometimes tortured or paradoxical, each is accompanied by his avatar, a cartoon drawing of what appears to be Theodor W. Adorno sporting a monocle.”
The Desires Driving Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”