“Described as ‘beautifully British’, the ‘subtle yet devastating’ put-down overshare was today named word of the year by the Chambers Dictionary. Collins, however, has plumped for photobomb as its choice, citing the words 100% increase in usage over the past year.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Rich People Want Us To Work For Free: “Internship” Has Gone Too Far
“I recently got asked by an administrator at the Library of Congress to do unpaid labor for its website. … I was dumbfounded to get hit up by a federal agency with an annual budget of $750 million. Yet clearly my experience was not a random event.” Gioia proposes “five simple rules of etiquette for this ugly new beggar-thy-neighbor economy:”
People Are Faking Disabilities To Get Free Theatre Tickets
“Belfast’s Grand Opera House is to review an access scheme for disabled customers, following evidence that it is being abused by people pretending to have disabilities.”
The Wrong Opera At The Wrong Time? The “Klinghoffer” Controversy Isn’t Really About Klinghoffer
“Clearly, last summer’s war in Gaza and the rise of brutal ISIS in Iraq and Syria ambushed the Met production, in the planning for years. … The larger picture, though, shows what happens when an artistic vocabulary is scrutinized out of context by hostile parties.”
Audience Engagement: The Traps We Fall Into
James McQuaid looks at four assumptions arts organizations tend to make that, all too often, simply don’t hold up.
Audience Engagement: How To Avoid The Traps
James McQuaid offers some strategies for shaking off the faulty assumptions arts organizations tend to make, and suggests some organizations we could learn from.
“Saturday Night Live” Just Ain’t What It Used To Be – Never Was, Not Even In 1975
“Matters of time have never been simple for fans, enemies, and frenemies of S.N.L. It is one of the few TV programs that people care about long after they’ve stopped watching it. People still talk about John Belushi as though it’d all been crap since then. Younger people do that with Dana Carvey or Will Ferrell.”
What Ellen Burstyn Survived
“When [she] was 18, she got on a Greyhound bus going from Detroit to Dallas. She had 50 cents in her pocket … She’d already gotten pregnant and had an illegal abortion. By her mid-20s, determined not to just get by on her looks, she left Hollywood to study acting with Lee Strasberg. In her mid-40s, after leaving an abusive marriage, she starred as a newly single mom in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The role was based in part on her own life, and it won her an Oscar.” (audio podcast; includes transcript)
It’s Time To Retire The Idea Of “Genius”
“From the ‘genius bar’ at the local Apple Store to bestselling books that trumpet ‘the genius in all of us,’ geniuses seem to abound. But if we consider the idea of ‘genius’ as it has evolved across history, it starts to look like we don’t really need geniuses as we once did. … The increasing banality of genius in the contemporary world has begun to dissolve it as a useful category.”
Neanderthals Weren’t Actually So “Neanderthal”
The idea of homo sapiens‘ predecessors having been “savage” and “primitive”, in contrast to our own intelligence and ingenuity, has been fundamental to our species’s modern idea of itself. “[Yet] Neanderthals created complex tools, buried their dead, had an organized use of space, probably cared for the infirm, and perhaps even conversed vocally.”