Today’s highlights from AJBlogs 07.16.18

  • Communities Are Creative Our next entry comes from Micah Goldstein via new Creative Community Fellow Jane Wegscheider and is a great video about an annual event in their Western Massachusetts community. Jane writes: Micah Goldstein is an emerging videographer … read more
    AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2018-07-16
  • Random facts about me that may surprise you I recently ran across a long-forgotten meme called “Random Facts About Yourself That May Surprise People” that I never got around to finishing or posting. I don’t know how surprising you’ll find the answers, much … read more
    AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2018-07-16

MoviePass Stock Dives, Losing 26% Of Its Value

The issue has lost more than 98% of its value this year and has continued to decline in recent weeks in the wake of AMC’s launch on June 20 of a discount pricing program, allowing customers to see three movies a week for a $19.95 monthly fee. MoviePass has more than 3 million subscribers and allows customers the chance to see a movie a day for a monthly fee of $9.99. But Wall Street has been losing faith in whether MoviePass can survive by selling data about its customers and striking marketing partnerships.

Is Economics Incompatible With Humanities?

Economics, Morson and Schapiro say, has three systematic biases: it ignores the role of culture, it ignores the fact that “to understand people one must tell stories about them,” and it constantly touches on ethical questions beyond its ken. Culture, stories, and ethics are things that can’t be reduced to equations, and economics accordingly has difficulty with them. Morson and Schapiro’s solution is to use the study of the humanities, and particularly of realist fiction, to broaden perspectives and to reintroduce to economics those three missing factors.

How Science Is Building Better Dancers

The Royal Ballet is rich in tradition, but the company’s 97 dancers are now supported by a 17-strong team of sports science and healthcare experts. “Our facilities are now similar to those of a Premier League football club,” explains Gregory Retter, clinical director of ballet healthcare. “Strength, jumping, force attenuation, cardiovascular fitness, psychological wellbeing and nutrition; all support the dancer to be free to create artistic excellence. This is a completely new concept in dance.”

How Is It We Acquire A Taste For Something?

Whatever the answer to this question, the phenomenon is rife. Children are unlikely to appreciate a sip of beer. Yet a decade later they may relish the evening’s first pint. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, they have acquired the beer-taste. Taste acquisition does not stop at beer and blizzards: consider coffee and classical music, olives and oysters.

So Why Did Amazon Price My Book At $2630.52?

“Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed.