Amazon wants to open a warehouse and shipping center in Canada, and the government is leaning toward approval. “Canadian booksellers have called on Ottawa to reject Amazon’s application, arguing that it would hurt domestic businesses and amount to a scaling back of this country’s protectionist policy toward its cultural sector.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
How Teaching To The Test Snuffs Out Children’s Creativity
“Imagine the future actress, who is told there’s no time to play in the dress-up area because she has to learn all her letters and memorize 25 sight words at the age of five. Imagine the up-and-coming Picasso who is chastised for turning in a picture of a blue cat eating a potato when the assignment had been to draw a self-portrait. Not realistic enough! Follow directions!”
New Way To Spread Box-Office Risk: Movie Derivatives
“Two trading firms … are each about to premiere a sophisticated new financial tool: a box-office futures exchange that would allow Hollywood studios and others to hedge against the box-office performance of movies, similar to the way farmers swap corn or wheat futures to protect themselves from crop failures.”
Film Critic Banned, Outrage Provoked — Why Do We Care?
“Although the charges and counter-charges in this case are pretty salacious, the furor is only partly about [New York Press critic Armond] White and [‘Greenberg’ director Noah] Baumbach. It’s also about the uneasy symbiosis between film critics and the movie business,” and it manages to suggest, “in the face of all available economic evidence, that what we do still matters.”
Exhibit Of Salinger Letters Is First Leak In ‘Dam Of Silence’
“The paper (Salinger had a fondness for goldenrod-colored sheets) and the typeface, ordinary in themselves, are the same ones with which the writer, in between letters, must have been producing hundreds of pages of extraordinary, unpublished fiction. Even the envelopes tell a story of growing fame and isolation.”
Shaw Festival Locks Out IATSE; Other Workers To Strike
“At first, 16 workers represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 461 were affected. They provide maintenance, ground crew and housekeeping services. But other union members representing production and sales, which make up about 160 members, also went on strike.”
Europe Experiments With Book Scanning
“On Wednesday, Google announced that it will scan ancient Italian texts … as part of the Internet company’s first publishing partnership with a national government.” Norway’s “national library last year signed a deal with a group representing all of the Scandinavian country’s publishers and authors to put 50,000 copyrighted books online that can be read for free.”
How Do You Win That Orchestra Spot? Get In The Minivan
Facing a 26-hour drive from Winnipeg to his D.C. audition with the National Symphony Orchestra, timpanist Jauvon Gilliam “called up timpanists in major American orchestras along the way and asked if he could play for them. He wanted to get used to playing nervous, in unfamiliar situations. … [B]y the time he got to Washington, he was in great form.”
What Critics Talk About When They Talk About The Nose
Kentridge, Gogol, Shostakovich: It only made sense to round up classical music critic Anthony Tommasini, art critic Roberta Smith and book critic Dwight Garner to talk with classical music reporter Daniel J. Wakin about “the music, the art and the literary threads” running through Kentridge’s Metropolitan Opera production of “The Nose.”
NYPD: Do Not Worry About The Naked Rooftop People
Antony Gormley is putting 27 life-size figures on rooftops and ledges of Midtown Manhattan buildings. “About the same time that the first figure was placed atop a four-story building at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue on Tuesday, the Police Department issued a statement reassuring New Yorkers that the figures are not despondent people on the verge of leaping to their deaths.”