Blog

About Time: Landmark Deal Gives Actors Profit Sharing On Work They Help Develop

The deal, reached between Actors’ Equity, a union representing 51,000 performers and stage managers, and the Broadway League, a trade organization for producers, is a milestone, marking the first time that the industry’s financiers have tacitly agreed to acknowledge that performers are contributing ideas, not just labor, to shaping new musicals and plays. – The New York Times

How Today’s Journalism Looks Remarkably Like That Of Yesteryear

If you explained Twitter, the blogosphere, and newsy partisan outlets like Daily Kos or National Review to the Founding Fathers, they’d recognize them instantly. A resurrected Franklin wouldn’t have a news job inside The Washington Post; he’d have an anonymous Twitter account with a huge following that he’d use to routinely troll political opponents, or a partisan vehicle built around himself like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, or an occasional columnist gig at a less partisan outlet like Politico, or a popular podcast where he’d shoot the political breeze with other Sons of Liberty, à la Chapo Trap House or Pod Save America. “Journalism dying, you say?” Ben Franklin v 2.0 might say. “It’s absolutely blooming, as it was in my day.” – Wired

Joan Acocella: How New York City Ballet Was Brought Down To Earth (An Epic And Chilling Account)

“People trying to assess Peter Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.” – The New Yorker

Criminalizing Drill Rappers For Performing Their Work Is Dangerous

“As a letter signed this week by human rights organisations, lawyers, academics and musicians argues, criminalising artists in this way is both unjust and ineffective. It is unjust because it denies the basic freedoms of those who are attempting to creatively, if distastefully, expose their experiences of subsistent life in the bleakest urban pockets of British society. And it will be ineffective at achieving any reduction in violence because it simply does nothing to address its root causes.” – The Guardian

As A Ring Is Busted, Counting The Ruinous Damage Of Years Of Fake ‘Authentic’ Native Art

Several businesses were involved in purchasing jewelry from the Philippines and selling it as “genuine” Native American art – scams worth $12 million, with 300 shipments from 2010-2015. “During the court hearing, Native American artist Liz Wallace said, ‘I don’t think calling this cultural appropriation is adequate. It’s economic colonization.'” – Hyperallergic