Many gamers seemed to struggle to find their place in society. “In our modern meritocratic society, you don’t have an obvious place in the way people used to have. You have to create it for yourself. That’s complicated. Fleeing into the more regulated world of the game—a Manichaean populist worldview—is an easy way out.” – The Atlantic
Blog
The Most-Visited Museum Exhibitions Of 2018
And New York’s Metropolitan Museum leads the way. The largest exhibition ever mounted by the museum, Heavenly Bodies was seen by around 1.43 million people at the Met’s main Fifth Avenue location and a further 230,000 trekked uptown to Washington Heights to see its continuation at the comparatively sleepy Met Cloisters. – The Art Newspaper
A Revolution In Foodie Culture
Josephine Livingstone: “I am not a foodie. I don’t even know the difference between a meuniere and a mirepoix. But from the outside looking in, it’s clear that foodie culture is roiling with a new awareness of social politics, undermining some of that culture’s unspoken tenets: that taste and pleasure are neutral, universal concepts; that the kitchen is an apolitical zone. Being a foodie now, in 2019, requires thinking with more than your tongue.” – The New Republic
Poet, Playwright, And Sociologist Eve Ewing Is ‘The True Mayor Of Chicago’
Well, not really, but she does have more than one finger on the pulse of Chicago’s fiery cultural heart, and she writes about it in more than one way. “Part of me is an extremely argumentative person, and I really also enjoy just finding information and seeing how I can piece it together to figure out something that had previously seemed inscrutable. But part of me just likes to play and I think poetry allows for that a little bit more.” – The Cut
Why We Procrastinate
It’s not about self-control. Instead, it’s more like (not very good) emotion management. “Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond.” – The New York Times
Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Fiction. Should Novelists Be Worried?
Maybe not, not yet. Garbage in (this AI was fed a lot of Reddit recommendations, ahem), garbage out: “Right now, novelists don’t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ – the machine continued the narrative as follows: ‘I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.'” – The Guardian (UK)
The Strategies That Helped Lupita Nyong’o Make Her Voice Super Creepy For ‘Us’
Nyong’o heard a speaker (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) with a neurological order that makes the larynx spasm involuntarily – and then, of course, she worked with a vocal coach to inject the emotions that inspire the character. Her director, Jordan Peele, didn’t know what she was doing until preproduction. “‘She sat me down and said ‘Are you ready?’’ the director recalled. He wasn’t.” – The New York Times
How Can We Put Theory And Context Behind Video Games And The Worlds Of Gaming? [AUDIO]
Yep, videogames, gamers, and their lives online need to be placed into context by … well … folklorists, of course. Says one, a gamer and a writer: “We all want to be part of a community, we want to be accepted and find people who are like us, and Ultima Online was kind of the start of that.” – Wired
A Scandal Engulfing The Shiny World Of Korean Pop Music May Transform The Country
Yes, it’s about sex tapes. But in a music world of K-Pop dominance, it’s time for a reckoning: “The Burning Sun scandal, as it’s been called, comes in the midst of a national conversation about misogyny and power — as well as spy-camera porn epidemic — and the momentum behind it has the potential to dramatically transform Korean society, or at least put several powerful men in serious legal trouble.” – Vulture
Austerity Almost Killed This Spanish Cultural Institution, But It Just Got Saved
The Spanish Royal Academy (RAE), the institution in charge of defending and defining the Spanish language, had been reeling under cuts for more than a decade. Then it got a new director – and he never stopped saying the RAE was of concern to the country. That worked, to the tune of 5 million Euros. Now, “the RAE will be in charge of at least 20 projects of exceptional interest, including the elaboration of different dictionaries, grammar or, now, its work of ensuring the correct use of language in the digital era.” – El País