“Kanye West’s ‘freethinking’ condemnation of generations of enslaved people’s failure to rebel,” explains Rebecca Onion, Slate‘s resident historian, “is drawn – whether he knows it or not! – from a dangerous ideology that’s older than the United States.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Liam Scarlett Is Choreographing The Royal Ballet’s First New ‘Swan Lake’ In 30 Years
“When it was announced that the Royal’s feathery blockbuster was being entrusted to Scarlett, eyebrows were raised. It wasn’t his talent that was in question, it was his artistic unpredictability. He exploded on the scene in 2010, when, still a junior dancer, he created Asphodel Meadows, a beautiful one-act work that proclaimed his classical credentials. Yet he went on to wrong-foot audiences with dark and disturbing works such as Sweet Violets (2012), a gothic sex-and-death thriller about a Jack the Ripper serial killer, and Hansel and Gretel (2013), reimagined as a grotesque paedophile nightmare. But hey, he says, it’s only make-believe. ‘I was just trying to tell a good story. You don’t have to worry about me.'”
Why Stage Beckett’s Novels When He Meant Them To Be Read (And Wrote Plenty Of Plays Already)? Here’s Why
Judy Hegarty Lovett, director of Beckett specialists the Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland: “The challenge is both daunting and promising. When we first staged Beckett’s novel Molloy in 1996, there were fewer questions about why we wanted to take it from page to stage. We knew Beckett himself had staged elements of his prose works in a one-man show performed by Jack McGowan. If the author himself had attempted to do it, surely it was possible. In the intervening years, I’ve come to see the staging of his prose as a convergence of form and content similar to that of the written works, where the very means of communication is in doubt.”
‘Mime Is Probably Now At Its Lowest Point In Its Modern History’ (But It’s Slowly Coming Back)
Marko Stojanovic, co-founder and president of the World Mime Organization, writes about what made mime popular in the periods it was and the state of the art around the world today.
In Children’s Lit, Family Dramas Are Crowding Out Adventures, Warns Awards Judge
“The fictional children of the past frolicked on the heather-clad slopes of Kirrin Island or battled the armies of evil at Hogwarts, free from the restrictions of their parents. Today, according to [Philip Womack], novelists are eschewing adventure stories for ‘claustrophobic’ domestic dramas and creating ‘a depressing children’s literary landscape’ in the process.”
The New York Times’ Chief Movie Critics Send Memos To Hollywood
“Every so often, … Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, fire off a number of thoughtful memos to the movie industry and the industry-adjacent. These messages are largely ignored, which does not stop Ms. Dargis and Mr. Scott from continuing this semi-serious tradition. Given the new summer season and how deeply fraught the past year has been – Harvey Weinstein, Netflix, #MeToo, #oscarsalittlelesswhitebutnotmuch – it was time for our critics to weigh in again with their thoughts (and complaints).”
When The U.S. Sent Its Jazz Greats Abroad As Weapons In The Cultural Cold War
“By the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement in the US had become a major international news story. People were horrified by the brutality of Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955, and by the mob violence directed at young black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. It undercut America’s claims about freedom and equality. US foreign policy officials decided that America needed to create a new international narrative about its domestic racial struggle.” Enter Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and their colleagues.
The Original Laugh-Track Machine, And The Man Who Became Its Virtuoso
It was know as the Laff Box, and it was mocked up – jerry-rigged, almost – by mechancial engineer Charlie Douglass. You’ve heard it on everything from The Munsters and Gilligan’s Island to Cheers and MAS*H, and “[it] could chuckle. It could guffaw. It could laugh with sighed relief. It even had a reel, controlled by the foot pedal, that was only titters, one person lightly laughing at a time. At its most sophisticated, the box had 320 laughs” – and Douglass deployed them with surprising cleverness and subtlety.
France Begins Multi-Billion-Euro Program To Revive Downtowns Of Smaller Cities
“France’s city centers are about to get one of the biggest makeovers in their history. Following an announcement last month, the country is launching a vast €5 billion ($6.1 billion) plan called Action Coeur de Ville (Action: Heart of the City) intended to revamp 222 city cores … in what the French call Villes Moyennes, ‘average cities’ with populations between 15,000 and 100,000 … over the next five years with new stores, offices, co-working spaces, and renovated housing.”
Robots May Soon Have More Intellectual Property Rights Than Animals Do
The final court decision in the famous “monkey selfie” case reaffirmed that animals have no IP rights under U.S. law, which requires human authorship. For now, the same is true for any works created by artificial intelligence – but, as Rachel Withers explains, this may soon change.