Month: July 2018

Can Climate Change In The Arctic Make For Good Theatre? This Playwright Is Finding Out

“Playwright Chantal Bilodeau first visited the Arctic in 2007. She had not thought much about climate change in the past, but seeing Alaska’s melting glaciers firsthand and hearing stories of forced migration propelled the crisis to the top of her mind. She decided to write a play about the high north, its people, and the challenges they’re facing.” Bilodeau is now expanding the project into an eight-play cycle.

Can There Be A Canon Of Western Literature In The Age Of The Internet?

“If the coherence and usefulness of the Western canon seem increasingly untenable today, for reasons that reach beyond ideology, the very concept of a canon — one critically authoritative corpus of thought — now feels harder and harder to countenance. Not only has the unfolding triumph of digital life supplied every claim and every authority with an effectively infinite number of criticisms, the digital revolution has called into profound question how any limited body of knowledge can claim canonical authority over a world where information is infinite.”

Now *This* Is A Game Show For Millennials: Winners Get Their Student Debt Paid Off

“Premiering Tuesday on TruTV, Paid Off With Michael Torpey is pretty traditional for the genre: There are three rounds of play in which contestants buzz in to answer trivia questions and earn points. What sets it apart from other entries in the genre is what happens in the final round. If the top contestant answers eight trivia questions correctly, she wins a cash prize equal to the balance she owes on her student loans, because the contestant pool for Paid Off is the more than 40 million Americans who hold student loan debt.”

What A Dreadful Way To Pick The Winner Of A Book Prize!

The Golden Man Booker. “As a system of selection, this is a curious conflation of the single expert and the wisdom of crowds — or, if you will, super elitism and mob rule. After all, each novel on the short­list was chosen by just one person (not nearly enough), and yet the winner was chosen by thousands (far too many). Having the unwashed public pick the best novel sounds wonderfully egalitarian, but it ignores all kinds of unanswerable questions about the self-selection and legitimacy of the voters.”

North America’s Longest Painting Is Back On View After 50 Years

“On July 14, an artwork equal in length to 14 blue whales placed in a line will go on display in its entirety for the first time in more than half a century. Incidentally, those colossal creatures are central to the work. At 1,275 feet long, the Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World, which was painted in 1848 in New Bedford, Massachusetts by Benjamin Russell, an artist and merchant, and Caleb Purrington, a sign painter, is the longest painting in North America, according to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which is staging the work’s big return.”

Defendants In Oakland Ghost Ship Fire Case Plead No Contest To Manslaughter

Three dozen people were killed in a December 2016 fire at the warehouse known as the Ghost Ship, which had been illegally occupied as an artists’ colony. Derek Almena, who held the lease to the building, and Max Harris, who assisted Almena as a sort of super, initially pled not guilty but have now pleaded no contest to 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter and are expected to serve several years in prison.