Author: Douglas McLennan

Chiura Obata’s Career Was Interrupted By Internment During WWII. Now A Retrospective Of His Work Has Been Stilled By The Virus

“Suddenly he was in a drab, dehumanizing place, first a stable in California, then the barracks of Topaz, Utah, where he spent most of his time in internment. It was bleak, hot, arid and dusty, and he missed green things, trees and gardens. He moved quickly to establish an art school, both at Tanforan and later Topaz. And when he represented the camp at Topaz, the sense of displacement became dreamlike, even surreal, a luminous landscape that looked just a bit scorched, with a few dark buildings in the midground standing in for the enormity of what was happening there.” – Washington Post

How Podcasting Is Changing

The podcasting business is changing at the speed of sound. There’s a pivot toward profit. And while that’s great in the short run for public podcasting, it also attracts new players and an aggressive new business model. Public podcasts that often started as spinoffs or experiments are becoming lucrative. NPR recently projected that podcasting would account within three years for 20% of its revenues. In public-broadcasting–adjacent venues, The Daily reportedly made millions last year, and Slate draws half its revenue from podcasting. – Current

How Dance Helps Me Think And Thinking Helps Me Dance

For most of my career, dancing and academic research were two separate but equally weighted spheres. However, over the years, I have become more and more aware that many people viewed dance as a less valuable way of thinking and working. Dance, in their minds, was a purely emotive activity consisting of uncritical, spontaneous movement or a purely athletic endeavour whose sole purpose is to defy our body’s physical limits. Part of the reason why this view of dance persists, I think, stems from a deeply rooted prejudice against embodied vocations. – Aeon

Comic Books Industry Grinds To Halt For The First Time Ever

Comics are largely sold through the direct market, moving from publisher to distributor to specialty comics retailers, as opposed to digital distribution or the newstands of yesteryear. But last month, Diamond Comics Distributors—the monopoly that supplies monthly comics to retailers in the United States and Britain—announced that it was refusing to accept new product from comics’ largest publishers, including Marvel, DC, Image, and Boom Studios. – The Daily Beast