Author: Douglas McLennan

Can We Consider Some Speech Violence?

“For people who occupy positions of power in society, there may not be a single word they would ever consider violence. But that doesn’t mean other people can’t legitimately experience some speech as violence. And when people say they do experience language as violence, it’s not because they’ve confused speech with physical assault; it’s because the language-game in which the speech-act takes place is different.”

Summer 2017: Movie Box Office Disaster. TV? It’s Doing Just Fine

“By the time Labor Day weekend wraps, summer box-office revenue is expected to finish at $3.78-billion [U.S.], down 15.7 per cent over summer 2016, according to comScore. That’s the steepest decline in modern times, eclipsing the 14.6 per cent dip in 2014. It will also be the first time since 2006 that revenue didn’t clear $4-billion.” Further, to no one’s surprise, the value of stock in companies that own theatre chains in the United States has collapsed – Regal Entertainment has seen shares plunge 28 per cent, while AMC Entertainment dropped 45 per cent. Meanwhile, television, even broadcast TV, is doing fine. It’s not a matter of across-the-board revival for the networks.

Rethinking the Nature Of What Is And Could Be

“I want our audiences to understand the vast scope of what a ballet can be,” says Paul Vasterling. Pushing that distinction means thinking outside the norm, whether in terms of subject matter, movement vocabulary, use of text and singers, or in performance structure and duration. This raises interesting questions around where exactly we draw the line between ballet and modern dance or musical theatre.

A Tiny Greenwich Village Theatre And The 100-Year-Old Woman Who Guards It

A curious group of six people lives above the theater. They are not ordinary tenants, but something like the cast of an eccentric, bohemian sitcom family. They are actors, authors and playwrights whom Ms. O’Hara offered lodging to years ago, and they never left. Mostly in their 60s and 70s now, they include a German man who smokes on the theater’s steps, a woman who wrote a memoir 20 years ago that inspired a television movie, and a man who was homeless before Ms. O’Hara offered him a crawl space above the lighting booth.

Which Pop Art Will Define The Trump Era? Enter Taylor Swift

Swift is a perfect, golden avatar of our moment, a child of the new century who understands celebrity as a form of constant curation of one’s brand the way that Madonna, a child of the old century, understood it as an act of persona creation. Whether or not she is a Trump supporter, she is an embodiment of Trump culture. And with this single, which broke a YouTube record in its first 24 hours, she has slouched in at the last minute to grab the title of Song of the Summer, or at least Song of the Summer We Deserve.

The Challenges Facing Houston’s Small Theatre Companies After The Flooding

“As in most cities, Houston’s small to mid-sized companies often don’t own their own spaces; they are itinerant or rent spaces. The effects of cancelled shows and evacuations will likely take their toll on these organizations, especially ones that are still emerging such as Shunya Theatre, Gravity Players, Rogue Productions, and Rec Room Arts. While each of these companies faces a different set of circumstances, they demonstrate just how much small theatre companies hang on by a thread and will need to rely on the greater Houston community for their continued survival.”

Study: The Idea That Universities Fight Inequality Turns Out To Be A Myth

“In a fascinating new paper published this summer, five economists, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, call into question higher education’s role in promoting upward mobility. The centerpiece of the paper is “mobility report cards” for each college in America. The researchers considered 30 million students between 1999 and 2014 and compared their parents’ incomes to their own post-college earnings, by school. With this data, they could see exactly which colleges helped the most students rise from the bottom of the earnings ladder to the top.”

Lessons For The US? – How New Delhi Dealt With Its Colonial Monuments

“Britain withdrew from the subcontinent seventy years ago this month, creating, amid the bloodshed of Partition, the independent states of India and Pakistan. (They came into being at the famous stroke of midnight, the moment when Britain withdrew its sovereignty.) The imperial statues in New Delhi presented a dilemma; compared with the challenges of poverty, industrialization, and the desire to consolidate a constitutional democracy, they were a minor irritant, but a highly visible one.”