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The No. 1 Threat To Creativity Today

“At just the moment when the technologies of borrowing, sharing, repackaging, and reinventing — technologies such as blogs, wikis, peer-to-peer file sharing, full-text searching, digital video, and off-the-shelf music mixing software — have become so powerful as engines for creative expression, copyright law permits, in effect, nothing at all. Just when the future of creative expression looks so promising, argues Lawrence Lessig, the claims of the past have been shored up, and they block the way.”

Do Culture Wars Mean Ignoring Science?

In Pennsylvania and elsewhere in America, culture wars are heating up in schools. A drive to include creationism in textbooks is emboldened by the recent election. Some schools also propose censoring school reading lists of “immorality” or ‘foul language’ and to allow the distribution of Bibles in schools. “In Texas, the nation’s second-biggest school textbook market, the State Board of Education approved health textbooks that defined abstinence as the only form of contraception and changed the description of marriage between ‘two people’ to ‘a lifelong union between a husband and a wife’.”

Why Digital Humans Look Creepy

There’s something creepy about the digital realism of thre computer enhanced movie “Polar Express.” But why? Perhaps things in the movie look too real? Or are they not real enough? “Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.”

Why Is Tavis Quitting NPR?

Why is Tavis Smiley quitting his NPR show? He says that his audience on NPR is not high enough and that NPR needs to do more to reach out to minority audiences. “The show, carried by 87 public stations nationwide, was created by NPR with the African-American Public Radio Consortium, in response to a campaign by public radio stations at historically black colleges for more programs aimed at minority audiences. Mr. Smiley’s show reached just under 900,000 listeners a week, according to NPR, many of them young and African-American.” But the show has built audience steadily, beginning with an audience of only 300,000 two years ago.

12 Theatres To Watch

What new American theatre companies ought you to be paying attention to? American Theatre Magazine has compiled a list: “Our representative dozen is by turns tenacious and permeable, ambitious and on a budget, esoteric and low-brow. The work ranges from re-envisioned classics (with or without clowns) to new work by contemporary playwrights; it’s vaudevillian, dance-centric, visual art–focused, music-infused, socially conscious, ethnically organized—and fun.”

Arts Funding, Jersey Style (It Helps To Have Connections)

Three New Jersey arts groups split $1.2 million from special allocations determined by members of the state legislature. The grants did not go through the traditional arts funding process. “The politicians conferred with members of the Treasury’s Division of Administration to decide the grants. The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the state agency that already distributed $22.7 million to arts organizations this year, was not consulted.”