Humor is about connection—shared references, shared emotions, shared perspectives. The best comedians both surprise and unite the audience. They create a moment. But moments keep coming. Over time, attitudes change, and humor has to change with them. When older comedians complain that they can’t perform at colleges anymore because the audiences are too “politically correct,” they are missing the point. – The New Yorker
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why Are So Many Christmas Feel-Good Movies Anti-City?
You don’t have to watch many of these movies to see the bad rap that cities get. Before our protagonist (usually a single woman) gets enchanted by twinkling lights and prop Christmas trees, she must first flee the grey, cold-hearted metropolis that leaves her feeling some combination of lonely, overworked, and grumpy. – CityLab
How Culture Was Used As A Weapon During The Cold War
Not only was literature politicised: sometimes it seems that any cultural initiative had the secret services of the US or the USSR behind it. We find the Soviet Union was backing the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, whose sponsors included Leonard Bernstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. The CIA, set up in 1947, had an equivalent faith in the potency of literary debates and publications. – The Guardian
French Protest Proliferation Of Street Advertising Everywhere
High tech video billboards are multiplying in city spaces across the world, woven into the fabric of everyday life, from ribbon videos down escalators on the London underground, to French metro corridors, New York taxis, bus-shelters, newspaper kiosks, and – increasingly – broadcast from shop windows onto the street. They are becoming more sophisticated and interactive, with the potential to collect data from passersby; increasingly bright and inescapable – impossible to click off or block like you can online. But in France, there is fresh debate on how urban planners and local councils should limit them in the public space for the sake of our overloaded eyes and brains. – The Guardian
How Art Training Helps Doctors, Police See Detail
“As I rose through the ranks, people would ask me, ‘Did the art background and training have an effect?’ There is something to that. By training in the art field, your brain tends to adapt and see things in a way people might not see.” – Artsy
Hollywood Is Digitally “De-Aging” Stars – What Will This Mean To The Business?
As Hollywood continues to enjoy its ability to recast mega-stars as their younger selves, it has brought fears that younger and less experienced actors are being pushed out. At the same time, some experts fear the rise of the digital actor could one day threaten the livelihoods of all actors, with the possibility of a movie starring a fully artificial performer potentially just beyond the horizon. – CBC
Popular Songs , Social Justice, and the Will to Change with Brad Schreiber
Author Brad Schreiber joins S.T. Patrick to discuss his new book Music is Power: Popular Songs, Social Justice, and the Will to Change. For two hours, Schreiber and Patrick discuss the impact of protest music (or more aptly, socially conscious music) on the culture and on their lives (while playing many of the songs discussed). Some of the topics discussed are the qualities that make up a socially conscious song, if American and British popular music working bottom-up made socially conscious music more plentiful, the Vietnam era, the misuse of Bruce Springsteen songs, what “This Land Is Your Land” really means, The Man in Black, The Dixie Chicks versus “W,” the impact of “the end of the Sixties,” Marvin Gaye in 1970, whether the music of the 1980s is underrated as socially conscious music, and much more. – Midnight Writers News
Wendy Whelan’s Top Ten Cultural Wants
What are the essential pieces of culture you have to have? For Whelan, they include Stravinsky, MoMA, socks and Chanel No. 19. – The New York Times
Hollywood’s Looming Content Crisis – Big Franchises Squeezing Everything Else Out
This year, a huge chunk of total sales went to a handful of titles. The top 10 films at the domestic box office have accounted for 38% of ticket sales so far this year, according to data firm Comscore. That’s up from 33% in 2018 and 24% five years ago. – Los Angeles Times
Glenn Lowry On How He Thinks About The Latest Version Of MoMA
“You can never be comprehensive in some absolute way. So, in a way, we’ve gone in the opposite direction and decided we’re not even going to attempt to do that. Instead, we are going to engage again and again and again. The way we are looking at it is that, rather than thinking of this display—which sprawls across almost 170,000 square feet and consists of almost 2,500 works of art—as somehow permanent or even quasi-permanent, we think of it as a point in time that over a two-to-three-year period will virtually entirely change again.” – Artnet