“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales … Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Are Foundations Making Non-profits’ Work More Difficult?
“Funders and donors, if you are restricting funding and focusing on “overhead,” you are actively preventing nonprofits from doing their work. You are helping to spread the fires of injustice. And at the same time, you are also disenfranchising the organizations led by communities of color and other communities most affected by inequity.”
Hollywood On The Verge Of A Writers’ Strike
“This should be a golden age for writers as peak TV has made television a genuine competitor with film in terms of prestige. But with new contract negotiations in the offing, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the production bosses have spent much of the past month acting like Truman and Stalin at the outset of the cold war.”
Georgia Legislature Approves Tax Breaks Intended To Spur Music Production
“The legislation offers tax breaks for recording and film scoring projects, as well as attracting groups who want rehearsal space to prepare for tours. If a touring band holds rehearsals and begins their tours in Georgia, and spend over $500,000 here, they will receive a 15 to 20 percent tax credit. Recording projects in Georgia that spend a minimum of $100,000 over a year’s time would also receive a 15 to 20 percent tax credit.”
The Guardian’s Music Editor On How Music Has Changed In His Eleven Years Doing The Job
“Rock music is in its jazz phase And I don’t mean it’s having a Kamasi Washington/Thundercat moment of extreme hipness. I mean it’s like Ryan Gosling’s version of jazz in La La Land: something fetishised by an older audience, but which has ceded its place at the centre of the pop-cultural conversation to other forms of music, ones less tied to a sense of history. Ones, dare I say it, more forward looking. For several years, it seemed, I was asked by one desk or another at the Guardian to write a start-of-year story about how this was the year rock would bounce back. But it never did. The experts who predicted big things for guitar bands each year were routinely wrong. No one asks for that story any longer.”
Life Lessons From Studying Dance
“When you do physical theatre. you learn when to give your weight, and when to let go. These are skills that are fundamental in a human being’s life, but we tend to ignore them.” His pupils, he said, learned how to “reach out” to others. They learned how to communicate. They learned how to listen. They learned how to work as a team. Oh, and their academic performance soared.
Celebrate The Music Industry’s Best Year In Eight Years (But Not Too Much)
“The music industry remains greatly diminished since its turn-of-millennium heights: 2016’s $7.7 billion in revenue is only half of the approximately $15 billion that was being made in 1999. The internet—piracy, cheap single sales, and free streaming—largely caused the declines seen in the 2000s. So if streaming is helping now, it is first helping to offset the enormous losses caused by the technology that enables it.”
Darwin Had It Right: Work Way Less, Accomplish Way More
“Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest ‘working’ hours.”
Crayola Asks Internet To Name Its Newest Color. So What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Didn’t this lesson sail into clear view after the Boaty McBoatface imbroglio? Or five years ago, when Mountain Dew solicited names for a new apple-flavoured drink? That campaign, “Dub the Dew,” was hastily aborted when the company suddenly realized it might be forced to sell a beverage dubbed “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.”
The Art Of Persuading You Without You Even Knowing
“The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Rather, these techniques change behavior by appealing to our nonrational motivations, our emotional triggers and unconscious biases. If psychologists could possess a systematic understanding of these nonrational motivations they would have the power to influence the smallest aspects of our lives and the largest aspects of our societies.”