Beloved Seattle bookstores were closing their doors throughout the aughts, and those who remained open seemed to face an impossibly uphill task — who would pay full price for a book when you could buy it for less online? But there’s more to an indie bookstore than the price on a book’s cover. In a manner worthy of a great writer’s unexpected third-act twist, independent bookstores have made an improbable comeback in the past few years, both nationally and locally. – Seattle Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
A Dance Is A Dance Of Course, Of Course (Unless…)
Can you copyright the moves? There’s more to the Fortnite video game complaints than copyright infringement. The plaintiffs are also bringing in their “right of publicity,” a different matter that looks at the dance moves as part of someone’s identity, whether the dance is copyrighted or not. – Washington Post
Screen Addiction? Yeah We’re Worried. But Should We Be?
If there’s one thing that gets lost most consistently in the conversation over alluring technology, it’s that our devices contain multitudes. Time spent playing Fortnite ≠ time spent socializing on Snapchat ≠ time spent responding to your colleague’s Slack messages. – Wired
The Book Revolution That Already Happened
We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. – Wired
Revolving Door? Toronto MoCA Director Moves On After Less Than A Year
Heidi Reitmaier is moving on in January to become deputy director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she’ll also serve as chief of public programming and learning. – Toronto Star
UK Government’s Brexit Proposal For Creative Sector Is “Huge Disappointment”
“Proposals to maintain the salary threshold, as well as the failure to include any measures to address the challenges faced by freelances, are hugely disappointing. It demonstrates government’s blindness to the major strains that Brexit and the current immigration system will have on organisations’ ability to recruit the talent they need.” – The Stage
Please: Transgender Theatre That Isn’t Strange
“To many playwrights, the very existence of trans people is enough to make up an entire plot, because it’s just that strange. It often doesn’t end up mattering where we come from, who we love, what we think—to be trans is so new and bizarre that everything in the play must be dedicated to parsing that, with almost no attention given to the other important factors that make up our lives.” – Howlround
Is There Any Wisdom In The Notion Of Wisdom Of The Crowd?
The “wisdom of crowds” refers to the result of a very specific process, where independent judgments are statistically combined (i.e., using the mean or the median) to achieve a final judgment with the greatest accuracy. In practice, however, people rarely follow strict statistical guidelines when combining their own estimates with those of other people; and additional factors often lead people to assess some judgments more positively than others. – Harvard Business Review
The Opera Podcast You Didn’t Know You Needed
“It’s an elegantly constructed, effortlessly listenable series that does exactly what you’d hope a general-interest opera podcast would do. It also avoids most of what you’d hope it would avoid—pandering, dumbing down, trying to make opera seem hip. (It gets away with its silly name, just barely, by claiming to “decode” what makes arias great.) The show seems to understand that there are plenty of people who know a little bit about opera and might like to know more; to do that, it makes use of the Met’s archive and extensive community of artists and thinkers.” – The New Yorker
What It Means To Disconnect From Facebook
Slate spoke with a small group of people who had publicly declared they planned to #DeleteFacebook. Most were successful, though some find themselves back on the site from time to time. Their stories demonstrate that reducing exposure to Facebook does not necessarily mean deleting an account, but that taking the extra step makes it easier to avoid falling back into the trap. – Slate