“Stories that are ability-positive center around real or fictional characters with different ability statuses, not for dramatic reasons, like an abled character experiencing a new struggle, but simply to show humans, in all their complexities, who make up the fabric of our world.” Tim Collingwood, an actor-playwright-activist who identifies as having Asperger’s syndrome, writes about how he was inspired to meet the ability-positive ideal with an adaptation of The Ugly Duckling. — HowlRound
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How Writers’ Estates Can Get In The Way Of Writers’ Work
Once a writer dies, their work is controlled by an estate. Of course. But that control can often result in censorship, unreasonable demands for fees, and suppression of scholarship. Pity the poor scholar/biographer searching for insight… – New Statesman
The Real Louis C.K. And Kevin Spacey Have Finally Emerged
Matt Zoller Seitz: “These types of guys thrive on attention, and if they can’t get the positive kind, they’ll settle for the negative. ‘Oh, sure, they’ve tried to separate us,’ Spaceywood said, inadvertently speaking for Louis C.K. as he emerged from his alt-right chrysalis and flapped his moth wings in Levittown. ‘But what we have is too strong. It’s too powerful.'” — Vulture
Report: Women Directed Only Eight Percent Of Hollywood Films Last Year
Small gains were made in other key behind-the-scenes positions, the study found. Women accounted for a greater percentage of producers, executive producers, writers and editors, compared with that number in 2017. The biggest increases were seen in the number of editors (21 percent were women, compared with 16 percent the previous year) and writers (16 percent, up from 11 percent in 2017). Still, the 2018 figures represented just single-digit gains from 1998. – The New York Times
Howell Begle, Lawyer Who Fought To Get Early R&B Stars Properly Paid, Dead At 74
“During a years-long pro bono legal fight, Mr. Begle represented [Ruth] Brown and other R&B artists, helping them claim royalties from past sales, industry-standard royalty agreements going forward, and other benefits in what became known as the royalty reform movement.” — The Washington Post
Want To Understand The Digital Revolution? This Essay Explains It
“We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.” – Edge
To Understand The Future Of Post-Advertising Media, Look To The 19th Century
Derek Thompson points us back to the age of the “party press,” when newspapers were funded by political organizations that “treated readers as a group to engage and galvanize. … It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press … [and to] the modern standards of ‘objective’ journalism.” (Mustn’t make the advertisers nervous.) “As the news business shifts back from advertisers to patrons and readers (that is to say, subscribers), journalism might escape that ‘view from nowhere’ purgatory.” — The Atlantic
Here’s Another Cambodian Dance Form Brought Back From Brink Of Extinction
We’ve read about how Khmer royal court dance has been revived (and even queered). Less familiar is the masked dance-drama lakhon khol, which was nearly wiped out, along with the country’s other traditional art forms, by the Khmer Rouge. Sun Rithy, a 46-year-old whose father and grandfather performed in the genre and trained him in it, now has a company of young performers dedicated to preserving lakhon khol. — Reuters
For Opera About Tibetan Saint, Composer Searched For Sounds She’d Never Heard Before
Andrea Clearfield added Nepali and Tibetan bells, conch shells, and singing bowls to the Western orchestra for Mila, Great Sorcerer, but even those were sounds she already knew. So she got an instrument maker to create seven entirely new instruments, from, as David Patrick Stearns puts it, “an ethereal tricked-out music box to a drone that suggests something primeval welling up from the center of the Earth.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer
Will Shortz In Hot Water For Ethnic Slur That Made It Into New York Times Crossword
“The clue for 2 down in the New York Times‘ first crossword puzzle of the new year was nothing unusual: ‘Pitch to the head, informally.’ But the answer stopped many puzzlers in their tracks. … It was a minor dust-up, all things considered, but it says something about the state of crossword puzzles in 2019.” — Slate