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Marcel Marceau Was A World War II Resistance Hero Who Saved Dozens Of Jewish Children

Recruited by his cousin, resistance leader Georges Loinger (who recently passed away at age 108), Marceau used his mime and acting skills to convince German and Vichy authorities that he was a teacher or youth leader taking young kids (who happened to be Jewish and incognito) to an exercise camp (that happened to be on the Swiss border). — The History Channel

‘Unnerving Kitsch’: The Problem With The New KGB Museum In New York

The flyer says the place offers a “journey back to socialism.” You can get a picture taken in an old restraining chair, or at a commissar’s desk in his coat; you can dial-a-dictator on an old rotary phone and hear Stalin or Brezhnev give a speech. It’s all “blithely morally neutral,” writes Masha Gessen. “In the absence of any historical or political context, everything becomes an exhibit. And, with enough cheer and an address in Chelsea, anything can be kitsch.” — The New Yorker

Provocation: Was Modernism Intended To Exclude The Masses?

“If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader did not understand it.” – JSTOR Daily

Hemingway Hoped ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ Could Be Made Into A Play. Now, At Last, It Has

The novel was adapted for film three times, but none were considered successes. (Hemingway hated the first one, saying that Spencer Tracy looked more like Gertrude Stein than a Cuban fisherman.) A.E. Hotchner, who was both Papa H’s longtime friend and his biographer (and is now 101), has partnered with his son to make the novel’s first stage version, which opens in Pittsburgh on Feb. 1. — The Observer (UK)

Your TV Is Now A Computer – And You’ve Lost Control Of It

Analysts estimate that smart TVs now make up about 70 percent of all new TV sales. The television is no longer a mere display​​​​​​, but a full-fledged computer, for good and for ill. And what is a computer now? On the one hand, it’s something companies sell to consumers for money. But after you’ve purchased an internet-connected device of any kind, it begins to generate information that the company can use itself or sell to third parties.  – The Atlantic

How The Prado Has Survived 200 Years Of Turbulent Spanish History

When Charles III commissioned the building in the 1780s, he intended it to become a natural science museum; by the time it was ready to open in 1819, his grandson Ferdinand VII decided it was to be a showplace for the royal art collection. Since then, it’s been involved in everything from art education programs for peasants to the country’s civil wars (the Prado’s importance was the one thing every side agreed on). — The New York Times

New Streaming Service For Arthouse Films To Launch This Spring

With FilmStruck having closed and Criterion’s planned service limited to the titles admitted to its Collection, serious cinephiles who stream were feeling a bit bereft. “Enter OVID, a recently announced partnership [whose members]… control the rights to thousands of different documentary, arthouse, independent, and international titles.” — Hyperallergic