Roughly 20 to 30 full-time employees in New York, including editors, ad sales and office workers, were told last week that they were all being terminated in two weeks — but could “reapply” for their jobs as contract freelancers. Louise Blouin’s mini-art publishing empire, which includes Modern Painters, Art + Auction and the Web site Blouinartinfo.com, has struggled financially in recent years.
Author: Douglas McLennan
We’re Safer And More Powerful Than Ever In History – So Why Do We Feel So Fragile?
“Beyond doomsday proclamations about mass extinction, climate change, viral pandemics, global systemic collapse and resource depletion, we seem to be seized by an anxiety about losing the qualities that make us human. How did we arrive at this moment in history, in which humanity is more technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to be increasingly fragile?”
Intelligence – How Is It We’ve Overlooked Animals For So Long?
“Hardly anyone actually thinks that we are the only minded species. But the philosophy of mind has gone on as if we were. As the ethologist Frans de Waal charges in this admirable new book, we have in effect been Darwinists about the animal kingdom but Creationists about the human head. This outcome has many causes, including a long and cross-cultural history of deep-seated attitudes towards our place in nature, cross-cut by our pathological denial of our exploitation of other animals. Such attitudes have been structured both by human vanity – with which the evolutionary process has perhaps too generously endowed us – but also by the genuine sense that we occupy a very interesting branch indeed on Darwin’s tree of life.”
Does The CBC Define Canadian Culture?
Sitting as it does, awkwardly at the intersection of commerce, culture and mandated nation-building role, it is dangerous for the public broadcaster to think of itself as defining the country and its culture. A good portion of the Canadian population is oblivious to what the CBC does. When CBC executives talk about “inclusiveness,” which they do a lot, they need to remember those who are oblivious.
Why Are Americans So Resistant To The Idea Of State-Funded Culture? (A European Wants To Know)
“In Western Europe, support for the arts is in great part the result of centuries of patronage culture. Cultural policy there is as much the product of longe durée tradition as it is about the post-war concept of welfare. And for countries like France, the arts inform its self-conception as a great nation. In the 1980s, the French government appointed a minister for Rock and Roll, to try to fix the country’s flagging presence in that field. By contrast, private interest has always had a large stake in the cultural policy of the United States.”
Amazon’s Latest Bookstore Is No Threat – It’s Just Dumb
“It’s hard to spend an hour in this antiseptic and bewildering store, as I did last week, and see it as an existential threat to anything. At best, it’s a bland attempt at brick-and-mortar retail. At worst, it reflects a company that’s grown so large—and so insanely profitable—that it doesn’t know what to do with itself.”
You Want To Bring International Artists To The US? You’d Better Be A Virtuoso Artist At Visas
“We submitted a 300-page document for the Chinese. That was the second document. The first document, I think, was 100 pages.” What’s in those fat documents? Responses to a seven-page “request for evidence” from USCIS.
The Difficulties Of Making Political Theatre When Our Politics Is So Theatrical Already
“It’s not easy to make political theater when American politics itself has been twisted into the format of a daily reality show. Trump won the presidency by blurring the line between TV spectacle and politics, and he has governed the same way, with policy choices of tremendous impact unfurled in multiday cable TV dramas.”
Spanish-Language E-Book Sales Soar – Key To Spanish Publishing, Says Report
“The soaring number of new ebooks published in the Spanish markets (more than 50,000 in 2016), the growing importance of digital reading in the region, and the increasing role of the Internet as a distribution and marketing tool for print books, as well as ebooks and audiobooks, all lead to the assumption that the rapid evolution of the digital market will be reality in most Latin American countries by 2020.”
Think Of Language As A Virus That Keeps Mutating
“This notion of language as a cultural virus is interesting and provocative. And quite possibly true. Certainly, in the vicinity of a modern human mind, language has this character. Language doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like arms or breasts or hair. Those whose access to language is blocked—for example, deaf children who are surrounded by people who speak but don’t sign—usually grow up with little or no language. But when these same children spend their days with others like themselves, the smallest spark of signed language flares and catches through the group as if through dry grassland. Or, if you will, like the measles.”