When more than 95 percent of your voting members make the same choice, you know, as a union, that’s where you need to go. In this case, “members of the Writers Guild of America voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new code of conduct [for agents] that would curb the use of packaging fees and other unpopular industry practices.” – Los Angeles Times
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The British School Utterly Transformed By Poetry
Award-winning British poet Kate Clanchy has been a teacher for 30 years, and she’s made some pretty big changes in her current school. “We keep winning poetry prizes at national level, which is great for everyone. We have built up a culture of success and confidence around poetry. Normally, the head boy of a school would be captain of the rugby team but our head boy, Mukahang Limbu, is captain of the poetry team.” – The Observer (UK)
What Drives Actor Dev Patel
Patel, star of Slumdog Millionaire, Lion, and now Hotel Mumbai, says that when he finds a new project, “after that initial excitement, you’re just drenched with fear of, now I have to actually do this. That’s kind of what happens with everything. It’s eagerness, curiosity and excitement, followed by fear and how the hell am I going to get through this?” – The New York Times
The Search For An Iron Throne Above The Arctic Circle
The masterminds behind Game of Thrones wanted to garner even more excitement for the series’ final season, so they sent people off on random quests for, well, thrones. Here’s the wild, weird story of a 25-year-old in Sweden who thought she recognized where one of them might be. – NPR
Guess Who Probably Didn’t Make ‘The Fountain’ Out Of A Urinal?
Siri Hustvedt: “Masculinity has a purifying effect, femininity a polluting one. The chain of associations that infect our thought dates back to the Greeks in the west: male, mind-intellect, high, hard, spirit, culture as opposed to female, body, emotion, soft, low, flesh, nature. The chains are hierarchical, man on top and woman on bottom. They are often subliminal, and they are emotionally charged. Ironically, these enduring associations become all the more important when the artwork in question is a urinal – a pee pot for men.” – The Guardian (UK)
Instagram Is For Vacations, Facebook Is For Family Photos, And TikTok Is For … Work?
Though honestly, no one understands the mysterious algorithm of this app, it has created a weird new window into work: “TikTok, which encourages users to contribute short videos to hashtags, or to join in on jokes or challenges or to sing along with clips of songs, has, in its manic and frequent demands for content from its users, become an unlikely force for labor visibility.” – The New York Times
Jeff Bezos’ Security Chief Claims That Saudi Arabia Hacked Bezos’ Phone
There’s a lot going on here. And then there’s the layer wherein The National Enquirer‘s parent company tried to make sure Bezos and his security chief signed a contract saying they wouldn’t publish the findings. – The Daily Beast
Genevieve Oswald, The Soul Of The New York Public Library Dance Collection, Has Died At 97
Oswald started curating the collection when it had about 350 items in 1947, and built it into this: “You can walk into the dance division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and request to see the ballet slippers of the early-20th-century ballerina Anna Pavlova, or a silk flower garland that adorned the modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, or countless other items in a vast repository of materials on dance.” – The New York Times
Exploring A Different Way To Paint, And Center, The Black Body
Painter Elizabeth Colomba’s goals include getting Black women into Western art history – and changing how people look at Black women in general. “When you think about black women wearing a period dress, you have a tendency to think that they were serving other people, another ethnicity, and they were not in power. That’s where I break the stereotype. And that’s what sometimes makes people uncomfortable.” – HuffPost
Science Fiction Is Trying To Imagine A Way Out Of, And After, This Time Period [AUDIO]
Tobias S. Buckell: “Nora K. Jemisin was just saying on Twitter the other day that in science fiction we have this venerable tradition of using metaphor to dig at some of these problems—like race and power and structure and history—and that it’s been a mistake, because in the past we would always use the metaphor assuming that our fellow readers and fans of the genre were following along, getting the metaphor, and it turns out that they weren’t. In other words, you needed to be way more in-your-face.” – Wired