“The Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MACCNO), a local advocacy group, issued a statement that, in part, noted that what wasn’t spelled out in the plan was as concerning as what was. So what exactly happens at 3 a.m.? While the draft didn’t get into specifics, city officials suggested that people on the street would then be “encouraged” to go inside or go home.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Just Six Months After The Olympics, Rio And Brazil Are A Disaster
“The budget disaster in Rio could be attributed to many factors, such as the fall in the oil prices, the expansion of the government payroll and the general recession. But there’s no doubt that reckless spending on the World Cup and the Olympics played a role. The city of Rio will be paying off the debts it amassed for years, while it also now has to maintain the arenas it built.”
MacArthur Foundation Picks Finalists For $100 Million Prize To “Change The World”
“Out of more than 1,900 proposals submitted, the foundation’s judges chose eight with goals that include eliminating river blindness in Nigeria, educating displaced children in countries like Syria, and caring for children in orphanages.”
When Writers Live With Writers Who Are Family Members
“If you have a famous name, you are probably judged a little more harshly. There’s a prejudice that can be slightly burdensome, or merely a little irritating. The presumption is that someone wrote the book for you, or that you never had to work hard to survive.”
New York Museums In All-Out Resistance To Trumpism
“The Whitney may have been the first New York museum to signal its resistance to the new Administration, but waves of actions have followed. No major institution closed in response to the #J20 movement’s call for an art strike during the Inauguration, but the Whitney invited Occupy Museums to program a series of talks in its theatre, and the Brooklyn Museum hosted a seven-hour reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.” Most significant, the week after Trump signed his now unravelling travel ban, the Museum of Modern Art replaced seven works in its sacrosanct fifth-floor galleries—the domain of van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock—with pieces by artists from three of the seven targeted Muslim-majority nations.”
A Case For “Slow” Science (Think Slow Food)
“The gap between identifying a problem to be solved, devising a technique and then putting it to work – a step often not even on the radar of those who initiated the process – can last a century or more. That poses a challenge to policymakers keen to evince the returns that money spent on R&D will generate. Although everyone knows they will come, no one knows how long they will take.”
New Yorker Report: Inside Reinventing The Oscars (Some Historical Perspective)
“Throughout the spring of 2016, Academy librarians worked overtime scrutinizing older members’ credits, as the board of governors fielded frantic calls from members asking if they were marked for demotion. When the board held its elections last summer, a handful of candidates ran on an anti-reform platform, among them the composer William Goldstein, who railed against the Academy’s response to “false accusations of implied racism.” They all lost, and Boone Isaacs was reëlected—indicating that her critics were louder than they were numerous.”
The Post-Circus Circus
The circus, for many, represents nostalgia for a “simpler” past — although that past can be tricky to reconcile with the injustices embedded in history. Still, there’s something inherently entertaining about a circus. So the new circuses aim to define what that is…
“Genius” Never Works Alone
“We still cling to the notion that groundbreaking creative work happens in isolation. And there’s no shortage of productivity experts who will rush to point out that the toughest, most high-value work takes mastery and deep focus—that distractions are bad, and that most distractions result from other people, all being forced to collaborate and failing miserably at it.”
Will “The Great Wall” Establish China As A Global Movie Powerhouse?
“Filmed entirely in China, the film is a $150-million (U.S.) attempt to prove that with enough money and talent, some of the brightest entertainment minds on both sides of the Pacific can assemble a film that audiences in both China and the West want to watch. It is also perhaps the most visible flagpost in a sweeping attempt to build China into an even greater entertainment power, one with the technical capacity and storytelling savvy to win over audiences far and wide.”