“‘Watch Now’ started out small with around 1,000 titles – about 1% of Netflix’s 70,000-video physical library – when it began rolling out on Jan. 16, 2007. Videos ranged from Hollywood classics like Casablanca, to cult movies, to foreign films, to mini-series – including the original 1990 BBC series of House of Cards.
Author: Matthew Westphal
The FM Radio Technology That Was Killed By One Two-Hour Lecture
As broadcasters the world over are gradually dropping traditional FM signals for digital audio, Ernie Smith tells the story of FMX, a 1980s technology that researchers and engineers were convinced would give a huge improvement in sound quality and be relatively smooth to adopt. Radio stations were gradually getting interested, until …
Despite Everything They’ve Tried, ‘Hamilton’ Tickets In London Still Got Snapped Up By Scalpers
The producers went to a lot of trouble to institute a paperless system that would keep tickets off the price-gouging resale market. That worked for (literally) less than two hours.
Wole Soyinka Has Now Fled The U.S. For Nigeria (Hoo-Boy)
The first African writer to win a Nobel, Soyinka had to sneak out of his homeland after dictator Sani Abacha confiscated his passport; he claimed asylum in the States when Abacha sentenced him to death. Though the playwright since moved back to Nigeria, he regularly took temporary gigs at American institutions. Now, in the face of you-know-what, he’s given up his green card.
Seven Signs It Might Be Time For A Dancer To Find Herself A Different Company
“How do you know if the negatives are outweighing the positives?” Sarah Wroth helps with yet another instance of things that should be obvious but never are when we’re the ones in the middle of them.
Does It Really Make A Difference If An Orchestra Is Centuries Old?
The Dresden Staatskapelle is 458 years old; the Royal Danish Orchestra (in Danish, the “Royal Chapel”) is a century older still. The Budapest Festival Orchestra, on the other hand, was founded in 1983, and many critics and listeners consider it to be easily a peer of the Dresdeners. Andrew Mellor considers the ways in which an orchestra’s institutional history might or might not affect how it plays today.
Is This Velázquez Genuine Or Not? Experts Have Argued For Years, And The Ringling Museum Is Going To Settle It Once And For All
Curators at the Sarasota museum have studied this portrait of King Philip IV with an infrared camera, and they think they’ve found the evidence they need.
Sotheby’s Sues Over Another Old Master Painting It Has Found To Be Fake
The auction house filed a complaint against the collector who consigned this work, which was described as 16th-century Italian, after testing discovered pigments that didn’t exist until the 20th century. (Sotheby’s launched a similar lawsuit in October over a different canvas.)
Is Rape Charge Against Moscow’s Scrotum-Nailing Artist Actually Legit?
News broke yesterday that Pyotr Pavlensky, Russia’s most notorious protest artist, had fled the country and sought political asylum in France due to allegations of sexual assault that he says are bogus and politically motivated. Rachel Donadio looks into the situation and finds that it’s not at all so clear-cut.
Ben Franklin’s Very First Print Job Resurfaces
“The demise of young Quaker poet Aquila Rose, while surely lamentable, is virtually forgotten. But this obscure death nearly three centuries ago is arguably among the most momentous deaths in Philadelphia’s 300-plus years – not for who Rose was, but for what he precipitated.”