The ideal of super-smart people using those super smarts to create disruption for the betterment of all, or as Steve Jobs once put it, engineers working, quote, “to solve most of humankind’s problems.” He said that more than 20 years ago. There’s been a lot of history since then. There’s been a lot of money made, too, but also there’s been the emergence of certain kinds of problems that are only possible because of technology. – Wired
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Next Great City For Artists? How About Des Moines?
The City has been growing a lot, especially the downtown. It’s ripe for a great arts scene. The trick? How to keep it lively and desirable but affordable at the same time. Artists love Austin, for example, but many are thinking of leaving because it’s gotten too expensive.
What Does It Mean To Be A “Teaching Artist”?
Eric Booth: “Teachings artistry lives in the hybrid zone, where two essential human realms meet—art and learning—to enrich one another and create the most fecund human space. Indeed, there is a tidal element to a teaching artist’s career as it ebbs and flows between the two kinds of projects.”
When Artists Tried To Spark A Television Revolution
Television was a revolution in the way people accessed information and entertainment. We forget now, but artists were intrigued not just by by the medium’s possibilities but also by its limitations. And they experimented with what it could and couldn’t do. – LitHub
How Technology Is Changing Our Sense Of Self
Peter Galison: “The general project that I’m working on is about the self and technology—what we understand by the self and how it’s changed over time. My sense is that the self is not a universal and purely abstract thing that you’re going to get at through a philosophy of principles.” – Edge
French Antiquity Dealers Protest President Macron’s Art Restitution Plans
Many tribal art dealers feel that their work in restoring and preserving pieces, documenting information about them and helping to establish collections, has been misrepresented and point to the lack of a legal framework around restitution. – The Art Newspaper
Prominent Literary Folk Who Died In 2018
It was a big year in literary deaths. End-of-an-era stuff… – LitHub
How Writers’ Estates Can Get In The Way Of Writers’ Work
Once a writer dies, their work is controlled by an estate. Of course. But that control can often result in censorship, unreasonable demands for fees, and suppression of scholarship. Pity the poor scholar/biographer searching for insight… – New Statesman
Report: Women Directed Only Eight Percent Of Hollywood Films Last Year
Small gains were made in other key behind-the-scenes positions, the study found. Women accounted for a greater percentage of producers, executive producers, writers and editors, compared with that number in 2017. The biggest increases were seen in the number of editors (21 percent were women, compared with 16 percent the previous year) and writers (16 percent, up from 11 percent in 2017). Still, the 2018 figures represented just single-digit gains from 1998. – The New York Times
Want To Understand The Digital Revolution? This Essay Explains It
“We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.” – Edge