Author: Douglas McLennan

Atlanta Doubles Its Arts Budget

The original budget proposal — the first budget under new Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms — called for the city to maintain its current level of arts funding at $995,000. But Bottoms lent her support to District 2 City Councilman Amir R. Farokhi’s push to more than double that figure to $2 million.

The Self-Improvement Wars: How we Became Obsessed With Being Better

In 1986, John Vasconcellos, a somewhat tortured California state assemblyman who had attended programs at Esalen, persuaded Gov. George Deukmejian to fund a “task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility.” Professors from the University of California were to study the links between self-esteem and healthy personal development. And California — nay, the world — could then design programs to nip homelessness, drug abuse and crime in the bud, by teaching people to value themselves and achieve their potential.

Study: We Refer To Women Professionals Differently Than We Do To Men

“On average, people are over twice as likely to likely to refer to male professionals by surname than female professionals,” Cornell University psychologists Stav Atir and Melissa Ferguson write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That matters because people “referred to by surname are judged as more famous and eminent,” and therefore worthy of recognition.

A Pop-up Shakespearean Theatre Rises

Shakespeare’s Rose, which opens on Monday and has cost £3m, is Europe’s first “pop-up” Shakespearean theatre. The Bard “would totally recognise it”, according to producer James Cundall. The temporary theatre has been built in a car park in 28 days to a circular design, similar to those erected on Bankside in Shakespeare’s day.

How Social Media Undermines Society And Undermines Us All

Facebook “farms” its users for data: the more they produce – the more “user engagement” there is, in other words – the better. Consequently, there is an overriding commercial imperative to increase levels of engagement. And it turns out that some types of pernicious content are good for keeping user-engagement high: fake news and hate speech are pretty good triggers, for example. So the central problem with Facebook is its business model: the societal downsides we are experiencing are, as programmers say, a feature, not a bug.

Can Libraries Run By Volunteers Be Sustainable?

Eight years ago, there were only a handful of libraries run by volunteers – around 10, estimates Public Libraries News. These days, 500 of the UK’s 3,800 libraries are operated by ordinary people, working for free in a role once regarded as a profession. The rise of volunteer libraries goes hand in hand with closures: in 2017 alone, 105 public libraries around the country closed, according to the Chartered institute of public finance and accountancy, bringing the total number of closures since they began counting in 2010 to almost 600.

How Simon Rattle Transformed The Berlin Philharmonic

It was “a period in which he helped transform the Berlin Philharmonic, one of Europe’s most venerable ensembles, into one of the 21st century’s most forward-thinking orchestras. He mounted ambitious educational extravaganzas, broadened its repertoire, reached out to Berlin’s diverse communities, and asked its musicians to embrace a different vision of what it means to play in an orchestra. It was a partnership that wound up succeeding despite occasional tensions, creative and otherwise, with the players — who self-govern the orchestra and hold the power to hire their chief.”

Study: Democracy Is Losing Ground Worldwide

A new study confirms that disheartening diagnosis. It finds 2.5 billion people—about a third of the world’s population—live in nations where democracy is in retreat. “Media autonomy, freedom of expression, and the rule of law have undergone the greatest decline among democracy metrics in recent years,” lead author Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburn in Sweden, said in announcing the findings. “This worrisome trend makes elections less meaningful around the world.”