“Today, in the United States, shyness is often associated with a broad jumble of related and overlapping conditions, from occasional timidness to general awkwardness, from stage fright to the DSM-recognized social anxiety disorder. This imprecision is, it turns out, fitting: Shyness isn’t a single situation or character.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Trump Is Having An Interesting Impact On How TV Networks Think About New Shows
ABC’s entertainment president Channing Dungey has already contended that her network’s programming may very well be out of touch. “With our dramas, we have a lot of shows that feature very well-to-do, well-educated people, who are driving very nice cars and living in extremely nice places,” she told attendees at the 2016 Content London conference “But in recent history we haven’t paid enough attention to some of the true realities of what life is like for everyday Americans in our dramas.”
Trump’s “Enemy Of The People” Comment? It Comes From An Ibsen Play…
So that’s where “enemy of the people” comes from. The enemy was unpopular, and undoubtedly an “elitist”; but he trafficked in fact, and he was right. Trump obviously had no grasp of this
In An Era Of Endless Choice, It’s The Massive Blockbusters That More And More Dominate
“As a business, entertainment has in some ways become less democratic, not more. Technology is making the rich richer, skewing people’s consumption of entertainment towards the biggest hits and the most powerful platforms. This world is dominated by an oligarchy of giants, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Disney (as well as Alibaba and Tencent within China’s walled ecosystem). Those lacking sufficient scale barely get noticed. Paradoxically, enabling every individual and product on the planet to find a market has made it next to impossible for the market to find them. Consumers generally favour whatever they find on their mobile screens or at the top of their search results. The tail is indeed long, but it is very skinny.”
Final Act: Why Do Some Artists Produce Their Most Interesting Work Late In Life?
There are obvious answers to that of course – experience is a great teacher. But what accounts for the sometime enormous turns in style and thought that some artists undergo?
The Big Challenges Awaiting New Directors For Tate And V&A This Year
Two of London’s biggest museums have new directors who have significant experience outside the museum world. This may lead to new ideas, but they may also have a steep learning curve…
Jazz Guitarist Larry Coryell, 73
“Coryell was still performing more than 50 years after his first recordings. He played at New York jazz club Iridium on Friday and Saturday night, and had plans for a summer tour with his fusion group The Eleventh House.”
Simon & Schuster Cancels Yiannopoulos’ Book
“Simon & Schuster received a hefty backlash to their decision to publish Dangerous in the first place, given Yiannopoulos’ history of xenophobia, misogyny, and hate speech. Some critics threatened to boycott the publishing house in response, and Roxane Gay withdrew her upcoming book from the publisher in protest.”
It’s Time For The Internet To Become A Public Utility
“As it stands, there is not only no incentive for the cable companies to not only expand far beyond the metropolitan areas where there are residences — it doesn’t make fiscal sense to go much further, which is why 43 percent of rural California residents have no broadband access — but there’s no real incentive for them to even innovate their products to provide better service for their existing customers. They’re getting their $50–80 a month for their substandard service anyway, as the only other choice is cutting the cord entirely.”
How Artificial Intelligence “Thinks”
“One can be book-smart, street-smart, emotionally gifted, wise, rational, or experienced; it’s rare and difficult to be intelligent in all of these ways. Intelligence has many sources and our brains don’t respond to them all the same way. Thus, the quest to develop artificial intelligence begets numerous challenges, not the least of which is what we don’t understand about human intelligence.”