“According to David Marcus, the head of music at Ticketmaster, last year Ticketmaster’s platform successfully defended against 5 billion bot calls. For a company that sells 100 million tickets each year, that’s a staggering ratio—and it means that even a 1 percent failure rate would mean half of their tickets are sold to bots.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Want To Be A Better Person? Read A Book You Hate
“Reading what you hate helps you refine what it is you value, whether it’s a style, a story line or an argument. Because books are long-form, they require more of the writer and the reader than a talk show or Facebook link. You can finish watching a movie in two hours and forget about it; not so a novel. Sticking it out for 300 pages means immersing yourself in another person’s world and discovering how it feels. That’s part of what makes books you despise so hard to dismiss. Rather than toss the book aside, turn to the next page and wrestle with its ideas. What about them makes you so uncomfortable?”
Mathematics As Beautiful As Any Work Of Art
“We all know that art, music and nature are beautiful. They command the senses and incite emotion. Their impact is swift and visceral. How can a mathematical idea inspire the same feelings? Well, for one thing, there is something very appealing about the notion of universal truth — especially at a time when people entertain the absurd idea of alternative facts.”
Netflix Gets To 100 Million Subscribers By Breaking The TV Business Model
“Shows like [teen suicide drama] 13 Reasons Why are very honest and raw and I’m not sure you’d find that on terrestrial TV and old school channels. Netflix has taken the model of [US cable channel] HBO, which revolutionised quality TV drama with shows like The Sopranos, and flown with it.”
Independent Film-making As We Knew It Is Gone
“In recent years, many of the indie-boutique shingles that the major studios once supported — Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent Pictures — have closed up shop. They’ve become victims of an increasingly corporatized, IP-centric major studio strategy. Those that remain, including Fox Searchlight, Miramax, and Focus Features, have been weakened.”
TV’s LGBT Revolution Is Gathering Steam
From inside these communities, there is a clear, rich stream of storylines that are less concerned with the physical details and more with the interior life of LGBT characters. “Look, we know what straight, white men think, what their hopes, desires and fears are, because we’ve been told nothing but them on TV. Which is precisely why a younger generation no longer owns TV sets. Programme-makers have to catch up or they’ll make themselves extinct.”
A Little Piece Of France Has Sprung Up In Harlem
“French-speaking Africans have settled and opened businesses on and around West 116th Street since the 1980s, with Petit Senegal lending the bustling thoroughfare a distinctly international air with passers-by in flowing boubous, shops selling phone cards for cheap calls to Africa, and Franco-African restaurants and vegetable stands offering tropical products like hot peppers, plantain and palm oil. But since the 1990s, a small French expat community, attracted by the romanticism of Harlem, its strong sense of community and colorful history, as well as by comparatively lower real estate prices, has sprung up, and, inevitably, so have French restaurants.”
Amazon Has Become A Major Player In Literary Translations
AmazonCrossing, the publishing unit devoted to scouring the world for good tales, has in a short time become the most prominent interpreter of foreign fiction into English, accounting for 10 percent of all translations in 2016, more than any other publishing house in a field populated by small imprints.
William Kentridge Sets Up Arts Space For Artists To Fail
The artist has called his foundation the Centre for the Less Good Idea—a reference to the process of creation, which often sees artists derailed from exploring their initial idea and focusing on “secondary ideas that emerge during the process of making”, he says.
The Confusing Jumbled Controversy Over “Fearless Girl”
“Fearless Girl” was meant to be up for only one week, and had it remained so, it may not have given rise to so much protest and analysis about what such a sculpture means for feminism, public art, and Wall Street. Those a big topics for one sculpture to take on, but if Fearless Girl ends up staying for good, it will be because she’s raised questions about female empowerment and representation well beyond Wall Street.