“With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. … This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, ‘what it means to be a human being.'”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Will An Arts-Loving First Family Lead By Example?
The “infusion of the arts into the Obamas’ public rituals and family routines comes after eight years in which George W. Bush seldom was seen in Washington’s halls of culture. Laura Bush liked to attend performances and museum exhibitions, Washington arts leaders say, but such patronage wasn’t a couples activity. Taking the Obama past as prelude, there’s a fair amount of evidence to support arts partisans’ hopes for a White House attuned to music, theater, fine arts and dance.”
Read Aloud, Kindle — But Pay Authors For The Privilege
Roy Blount Jr. explains the Authors Guild’s complaint — which has angered the National Federation of the Blind — about the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function. At issue is payment for audio rights to the books. “[P]ublishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability. … But that doesn’t mean Amazon should be able, without copyright-holders’ participation, to pass that service on to everyone.”
Offending Thai Royalty Was No Publicity Stunt, Author Says
“A Victorian writer jailed in Thailand for maligning the royal family in his self-published novel has denied he included the offending passage as a publicity stunt to win literary fame. Harry Nicolaides was released from prison last Friday after receiving a royal pardon and arrived back in Melbourne at the weekend. A former colleague of Nicolaides, Heath Dollar, has accused the author of including a passage in his novel, Verisimilitude, knowing it would violate Thai law.”
Good Earth Manuscript, Long Lost, To Go On View
“[F]our decades after its mysterious disappearance, and two years after it was recovered by the FBI, the original, hand-edited manuscript of The Good Earth is about to go on display in Bucks County. Tomorrow, executives at the author’s … foundation plan to announce an agreement that will let them show the typescript beginning next Tuesday.”
Courting Youth, Arts Groups Venture Into Social Media
“[T]he Pennsylvania Ballet is not alone in lusting after online social-network users. The Kimmel Center has a Flickr photostream. The Curtis Institute of Music is on LinkedIn. The Arden Theatre and the Franklin Institute use Twitter. The Philadelphia Orchestra has a MySpace page. … The Philadelphia fine-arts scene has gone viral, and no one is hiding the reason.” That reason, in a phrase? Young audiences.
Scientist: Social-Networking Sites Jeopardize Young Brains
“Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.” Oxford professor Lady Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, “told the House of Lords that children’s experiences on social networking sites ‘are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance.'”
For Best Results, Playing Should Be Part Of The Curriculum
“New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades. … Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.”
Americans Watch More TV Than Ever, And Not Just On TVs
“If you’ve seen that Hulu commercial starring Alec Baldwin, you surely know that TV is a plot devised by aliens to turn our brains into mush so they can scoop them out and eat them. … The human race seems to be falling for this devious scheme, and aliens must be readying their sporks and knives.” That’s right: American TV viewing is at “an all-time high,” and people are watching even more hours of TV online and on cell phones.
Film Library Pledged As Collateral, Distributor Goes Under
“New Yorker Films, the distributor that helped introduce American moviegoers to the works of Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ousmane Sembène, announced on Monday that it was going out of business after 44 years.” Founder Dan Talbot, 82, “said in a telephone interview that the company was going out of business because its library was being sold. It had been pledged as collateral on a loan taken out by its former owner, Madstone Films, which bought New Yorker Films in 2002.”