The unofficial tour featured talks by Palestinian, Iraqi, Greek, and Indigenous Australian activists. Around 300 people attended the tour, including those who came especially for the event and museum visitors who decided to listen in. – Hyperallergic
Author: Douglas McLennan
Does What I’m Doing Right Now Count As Writing?
Making lists of ideas, reading novels, scheduling time to sit down at your computer, researching new coffee shops at which to work, and establishing weekly word goals may seem like parts of writing, but they are not. They are procrastination, which, if you think about it, is actually writing in its purest form. – The New Yorker
Nicholas Hytner To Open New 600-Seat Theatre In Kings Cross
Former National Theatre bosses Sir Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr will run the venue, which is under construction and is set to open in winter 2021. It will be based on the Bridge Theatre, which the pair opened in October 2017. – BBC
Study: Participating In Arts Boosts Sense Of Wellbeing
Commissioned by BBC Arts, it represents the first time that researchers have explored how creative activities, such as acting in a play, singing in a choir, or playing an instrument or painting, can help manage emotions and mood. It found three main ways in which people use creativity as coping mechanisms to control emotions. – The Stage
LA MoCA Announces A New Senior Curator, Says No To A New Chief Curator
The museum will announce Wednesday that its new senior curator and head of new initiatives will be Mia Locks, co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She is an independent curator based in New York who had been an assistant curator at New York’s MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s affiliate in Queens. – Los Angeles Times
Dressing Up: Miami Beach Is Getting A Major Public Art Makeover
Like the city around it, the public-art program aspires to be both local and global. According to curator Brandi Reddick, the projects, by six internationally-renowned artists chosen from over 500 who applied. – CityLab
Adam Gopnik Tries To Explain Liberalism (It Doesn’t Go Well)
“The imaginative locus of Gopnik’s liberalism is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. It is the liberalism of the Enlightenment café, of the bourgeois-bohemian bedrooms of nineteenth-century political theorists—what you would get if you crossed John Stuart Mill’s and George Eliot’s sex lives with Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of rational communication.” – The New Republic
The Rise Of Book Clubs In Afghanistan
“Books clubs are an indicator of a young generation that has come of age after 9/11. Many have liberal leanings and seek a space where they can talk openly. During the Taliban, Kabul University’s library was destroyed, but it has come back to life.” – The Guardian
Study: Country Music Is Getting More White, More Specifically Male
“Contemporary country celebrates heterosexual men in blue-collar occupations just like the genre did in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. But the ideal rural man is now depicted as a particular type of heterosexual provider, while white women have increasingly been represented as the ideal sexual objects to complement this masculinity.” – Pacific Standard
Starbucks Got About $2.3 Billion In Free Advertising From The “Game Of Thrones” Coffee Gaffe
“The label is muddled in shadow, but many fans speculated that it was the iconic green siren from Starbucks — and most of the jokes and discussion called out the Seattle coffee chain by name. Turns out, it was just a craft services cup.” – CNBC