Author: Douglas McLennan

Using Fun And Games To Teach Professional Dancers

“Just because students are in an advanced technique level doesn’t mean they’ll feel confident moving without set steps.” To get students to explore outside their comfort zones, Alisia Pobega and Louis-Martin Charest use the lightness of open-ended games and exercises as a kind of permission for students to begin to create something independently, without the goal of technical perfection or aesthetics. – Fjord Review

Will AI-Powered Avatars Replace Many Of Our Public Interactions?

The idea is that these kinds of AI interactions scale in a way that actual humans do not, and while that may seem ominous for the future of real human connections, from the AI Foundation’s point of view it’s not all that different from the way we use social media today. In both cases, the interactions are asynchronous, and they allow us to reach people we otherwise might not talk to at all. – Fast Company

“American Dirt” – An Immigrant Story That Rings False To Immigrants

The heart of the problem is the industry — the critics, agents, publicists, book dealers who were responsible for this project. They’ve shown just how little they know about the immigrant experience beyond the headlines. So we are left with this flawed book as our model, these damaging depictions at a time when there’s already so much demonizing of immigrants. – Los Angeles Times

10,000 Photos Of Alvin Ailey Company Are Now Online

The digitized collection includes 8,288 black-and-white negatives, 2,106 color slides and transparencies, and 339 black-and-white prints depicting the repertory of Alvin Ailey, choreographers, and iconic solo performers the company is known for. Acquired in 2013, the collection is jointly owned by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. – Hyperallergic

Outcry Over “American Dirt” Shows What’s Wrong With The American Publishing Business

The clumsy, ill-conceived rollout of “American Dirt” illustrates how broken the system is, how myopic it is to hype one book at the expense of others and how unethical it is to allow a gatekeeper like Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power. Imagine a publishing industry that dispensed with hit-making, that used the millions of dollars poured into “American Dirt” to invest more into promoting a greater number and panoply of authors. – The New York Times

Boycott Brexit Commemorative Medal Over Lack Of Oxford Comma?

“The ‘Brexit’ 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,” wrote the novelist Philip Pullman on Twitter, while Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell wrote that, while it was “not perhaps the only objection” to the Brexit-celebrating coin, “the lack of a comma after ‘prosperity’ is killing me”. – The Guardian