Author: Matthew Westphal

For Labor Day, A Tribute To Arts Workers

“Before you start loading up your fall culture calendar, take a moment this Labor Day Weekend to reflect on those people who make sure that the city’s cultural events … go off without a hitch. In a culture center like New York, that means there are thousands of people to thank; here, we introduce you to several of them. These are edited excerpts from conversations.” – The New York Times

Pornhub (Yes, Pornhub) Joins The Battle Against The Plastic Polluting The World’s Oceans

A new video titled Dirtiest Porn Ever shows us the basic sex on a beach — except that this beach is absolutely covered with plastic trash, which workers in Pornhub-branded protective suits pick up as the performers do their thing. Why Pornhub? Well, can you think of another site that has broader reach to raise awareness? (And with each view of the video, Pornhub will donate to a ship cleaning up an ocean garbage patch.) – Dezeen

Four Years Ago, Italy Tried To Reform The Way Its Major Museums Are Run. Did It Work? Yes And No …

“In August 2015, the then Italian culture minister, Dario Franceschini, announced the first 20 ‘super directors’ of national museums, granting those institutions fiscal autonomy for the first time and, in theory at least, far greater managerial independence.” With many of those directors’ initial contracts running out, and with the government possibly undoing the reforms, did they make a difference? Politically, probably not; practically, yes, in some ways. – Apollo

The New U.S. Poet Laureate And Native American Memory

“[Joy] Harjo interrogates both one’s responsibility toward one’s culture and the fear of being buried under its weight. … This ‘trade language,’ as she later calls English, is weak, insufficient. It’s the language of the American story, and it comes freighted with all of that story’s history, atrocity, and false hope. How, she asks, can we escape its past?” – The New Yorker

A Linguist Makes The Case For The Use(fulness) Of The Word ‘Like’

Language acquisition professor Rebecca Woods assembled what linguists call a corpus (“a representative sample of language as used by certain speakers”) from a BBC show (the makeup competition Glow Up) that’s regularly complained about for its young participants’ constant use of like. Studying this corpus, she found that the word isn’t just filler: it’s actually governed by a sort of grammar and serves a real purpose. – The Conversation

A Young Breakdancer From Provincial Russia Dreams Of Olympic Gold

Sergey Chernyshev, 18, began learning breakdancing from his father, also named Sergey, who picked it up from VHS tapes that made it into newly de-Sovietized Russia in the 1990s. “In many ways, the story of the Chernyshevs … is the story of break dancing over the past three decades, with its unlikely journey from the streets of New York to every corner of the globe and to its surprising inclusion, pending a final vote in December, in the Olympics.” – The New York Times