“Perhaps Charles Manson also remains a source of such horror and continued fascination because he was the ultimate symbol of insanity. With eyes that either projected total blankness or the agitated evil of a demon awakened, Manson looked like what most people stereotypically think of when they imagine a crazy person. In what may be the craziest time that many Americans have lived through, it makes twisted sense, then, that the most recognizable American psycho is still so omnipresent in our culture.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Are Digital News Media Publishers Crashing?
“Online advertising is looking more and more like a contest that publishers can’t win—not on a large scale, at least. Advertising can help to cover some of their costs, but online ads alone won’t pay for big, serious, high-quality journalistic enterprises the way that print ads once did. The idea that the news business needs to find different revenue models—subscriptions, memberships, events, nonprofit status—is hardly new. But it’s time for online media companies to take a harder look at it than they have before.”
Modern Languages Association: Full-Time Jobs Teaching English In Universities Declines To New Low
The association’s Job Information List — a proxy for the tenure-track (or otherwise full-time) job market in English and foreign languages — included 851 jobs last year in English, 11 percent (102 jobs) fewer than the year before. The foreign language edition list included 808 jobs, or 12 percent (110 jobs) fewer than the year before.
Shannon Michael Cane, 43: He Transformed The World Of Art Book Fairs
One force behind the rise of these fairs was Shannon Michael Cane, an exuberant, heavily tattooed Australian expatriate and autodidact book aficionado who in 2013 took over the Printed Matter book fair in New York, the granddaddy of such gatherings. He proceeded to transform it into a radically inclusive affair, attended by venerable rare-book dealers alongside obscure zine makers so scrappy that they could barely afford the plane fare to participate.
Study: Why So Much Sexual Harassment? It’s All About The Power (Or Lack Thereof)
“People who see themselves as chronically denied power appear to have a stronger desire to feel powerful, and are more likely to use sexual aggression toward that end,” writes a research team led by psychologist Melissa Williams of Emory University. “Power can indeed create opportunities for sexual aggression, but it is those who chronically experience low power who will choose to exploit such opportunities.”
Dallas Symphony Names Its First Woman President
Kim Noltemy joins a small but growing group of female symphony CEOs, including the ones who run the orchestras in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit. But she also brings another possibly major change to the symphony. In her 21-year career with the BSO, Noltemy comes out of marketing and digital marketing in particular
Chinese Movie Box Office Tops $7.5 Billion, Up 15 Percent Over Last Year
Local reports say that as of 6:57PM on Monday night local time, a total of 1.45B moviegoers had attended cinemas in 2017 so far, a 15% increase on 2016. Last year’s box office saw a severe deceleration in growth, to just 3.7% (RMB 45.7B/$6.58B) after a record 2015 had surged 48.7%.
Dealer Mary Boone Settles Art Dispute With Alec Baldwin
The actor received a seven-figure settlement from Boone over a $190,000 Ross Bleckner painting he bought in 2010 that turned out to be a different painting than the one she promised to deliver. The agreement, reached last month and finalized on Friday, concludes a civil fraud case that was scheduled to head to trial next year.
Instagram Nation? True We’re Obsessed With Images, But We Always Have Been
It is tempting to believe that we live in a time uniquely saturated with images. And indeed, the numbers are staggering: Instagrammers upload about 95 million photos and videos every day. A quarter of Americans use the app, and the vast majority of them are under 40. Because Instagram skews so much younger than Facebook or Twitter, it is where “tastemakers” and “influencers” now live online, and where their audiences spend hours each day making and absorbing visual content. But so much of what seems bleeding edge may well be old hat; the trends, behaviors, and modes of perception and living that so many op-ed columnists and TED-talk gurus attribute to smartphones and other technological advances are rooted in the much older aesthetic of the picturesque.
Scientists Are Wrong. A Lot…
Most reasonable people will begrudgingly accept that any given scientific finding has a small chance of being false. It’s like finding out that the FDA allows 1mg of mouse feces in a pound of black pepper; mouse poop is unsavory, but at least it only makes up 1 part in 450,000. However, there has been a growing concern for a bit over a decade that the state of science is far worse than this.