Howard Sherman says the time has come to figure this out: “So long as there are categories for best actor and actress (or best male and female actor), those who identify outside of the binary will be left out, misidentified and othered. This will come home to roost the first time someone with non-binary identity is nominated for an award, and then we will see awards-giving organisations doing hurried acrobatics to come up with a solution. The better option is to understand where the thinking is heading, and thoughtfully make the appropriate changes now.” – The Stage (UK)
Author: ArtsJournal2
So, What Exactly Is L.A.’s Urban Plan For The New LACMA District?
Um … indeed. “The big question is whether Los Angeles can pull it together to approach its public urban spaces in ways that are more cohesive and more mindful of human scale — and perhaps (just perhaps!) correct some of the errors of the past.” – Los Angeles Times
How A Large, Decentralized Social Network Is Dealing With A N*zi Problem
Mastodon was meant to be a kinder, gentler, no-fascist Twitter. Then a right-wing social network moved to Mastodon. “It’s a hard problem, playing off the deepest limitations of decentralized projects like Mastodon. Mastodon arose from the idealistic open-source software movement, designed to let anybody run their own social media site. But it was never intended to support something like Gab.” – The Verge
Someone (A Lot Of People, To Be Honest) Has To Mow The Lawn At The Largest Sculpture Park In The U.S.
Storm King is big. Really, really big: “The art here is nestled amid 500 acres of verdant hills, exposed to the ever-shifting and unrelenting climate of New York’s Hudson Valley.” – The New York Times
Microsoft’s Ebook Apocalypse And The Very Dark Side Of Digital Rights Management
You know you’re just sort of renting those ebooks you supposedly bought, right? Well, let the demise of Microsoft ebooks explain it all to you. “The digital bookstore never took off. As of April 2, it halted all ebook sales. And starting as soon as this week, it’s going to remove all purchased books from the libraries of those who bought them.” Sorry, what? Yes. If you bought Microsoft ebooks, they’re soon to be gone. – Wired
Is Facebook’s First ‘Civil Rights Audit’ Actually Going To Change Anything?
Well … it’s a first step. A big first step. “When you scale a sizable part of Mount Everest, are you making progress? Yes, but have you reached the summit? No. So we haven’t reached the summit by any means, but we have really put a few stakes in the ground.” – Vice
Understanding Social Media As Just One More Way Of Controlling Women
Start with the murder of a social media star, and you unravel a thread that ends up in a particularly unsavory place. “It can very quickly spiral from someone disliking an opinion you have to real violence. It’s really not just a case of words on a screen. This is an exciting time for us. Groups that were previously marginalised – queer groups, religious minorities – have found a space online. It is a moment of real freedom. But it comes with real danger. We’re starting to be smarter about online safety, but then, so are the people who don’t like our opinions.” – The Observer (UK)
When Judith Krantz Died Last Week, Did The Era Of ‘Bonkbusters’ Come To Its End?
Possibly. “Krantz was the ‘queen of the bonkbuster,’ those glitzy novels with their gaudy covers and snappy often one-word titles – Scruples, Lace, Rivals – that dominated commercial fiction in the late 1970s and 1980s, spinning stories of fabulous lives lived at full tilt and stuffed full of sex, secrets and shopping.” But they were so much more than that: “They are also part of a rich tradition of novels which place women’s interior lives and, most importantly, their sexual desires centre-stage.” – The Observer (UK)
In The New ‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ Aaron Sorkin And Broadway Utterly Fail Scout
Yikes: “How does a white man from New York City tell a Southern Gothic about a young girl growing up in the Depression Era South, a story inspired by the female author’s lived experience? For Sorkin, it’s easy—you just silence her voice.” – LitHub
Let’s Talk About Contemporary Poetry’s Use Of The Exclamation Point
Obviously, perhaps, they used to be more common in poetry than they are now – think Wordsworth, Dickenson, and so many more. Now, “exclamation marks are not exactly rare in contemporary poetry—but they are occasional enough for us to take notice. For all their ubiquity in texts and emails, exclamation marks call attention toward themselves in poems: they stand straight up.” – The Millions