Kwame Anthony Appiah: “Like all the words in our language, the identity labels we use are a common possession. Were everybody to follow Humpty Dumpty’s example [‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’], we simply couldn’t understand one another. If Toni Morrison isn’t a black woman, the term isn’t doing any work. … ‘Lesbian’ isn’t much use if you’re looking for a partner on Bumble unless it signifies a woman who might be open to sex with another woman.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Reduced to Rubble: Video from Incinerated Interior of National Museum of Brazil (plus: the aftermath)
WARNING: The video below (posted yesterday on Twitter) of the fire-ravaged interior of what was once the National Museum of Brazil (now largely reduced to rubble) may induce nausea and is not for the faint-of-heart.
The Strange Death of the Alternative Press
For the last few months I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the abiding concerns of this blog and the book that inspired it. Mostly, I’m talking about what we used to call the press …
On the far side
Mrs. T and I are putting our lives back together after her unexpected hospital stay. It’s taken some doing.
Van Gogh Museum Sends High-Quality Reproductions On Tour Of U.S. Shopping Malls
It’s a straightforward outreach program to connect with people who may rarely or never visit a museum, let alone Amsterdam. But the reproductions are made with a new process the museum calls “reliefography” – and (this is in a mall, after all) some of them are available for purchase.
TV Seeks Diverse Writers But Is Having Trouble Finding Enough
“In more than three dozen interviews, writers, producers, and studio and network executives said heightened scrutiny in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite and other controversies has led to the concerted push, particularly for women of color in senior positions. … [But relatively few are in the supply chain. It is a problem of Hollywood’s own making.”
Maybe Literature Really Is Dead
If so, then modern technology is not the murderer, writes David Ulin. After all, when books had their greatest power and influence (he cites Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as an example), mass-market printing was cutting-edge technology. That’s not to say that today’s technology isn’t involved in the death, though.
Berlin Train Station Gives Up Plan To Use Atonal Music To Drive Away Undesirables
Last month, Germany’s national rail operator announced that it would start broadcasting atonal music from the speakers at Berlin’s Hermannstrasse station in order to repel drug dealers and homeless people who were congregating there. The city’s new-music community rose up in protest. Lisa Benjes of the Initiative Neue Musik writes about how she organized a concert of atonal music at the station that convinced the powers-that-be to abandon that plan.
As New Stories Get Told On Stage, New Forms For Them Challenge Ideas Of ‘Good’ Theatre
Lyn Gardner, in a post-Edinburgh column, considers plays that “have a fractured messiness that upends some of the traditional ways we tell stories on stage. … We need to recognise that what might once have been considered failings are in fact their strength. It is theatre that is as much about disrupting the traditional form as telling stories about women that are different from those traditionally told, if they have been told at all.”
Who’s The Next Ivo Van Hove? The Guardian Picks Five Of Europe’s Hottest Experimental Theatre Directors
Matt Trueman’s list includes an Austrian who has actors lip-sync amid candy-colored stage designs, a Frenchman who stages marathon adaptations of great novels, an Austrian who creates devised theatre with ethnic minority and refugee casts, a Vietnamese-Frenchwoman who draws from both literature and post-colonial experience, and a Croatian whose ferociously confrontational work regularly attracts death threats.