Apollo editor Thomas Marks: “Restitution often feels like a disquieting concept for many Western museum-goers (myself included), for whom the values one invests in museums are unlikely to correlate with the political or intellectual projects that led to the formation of their collections.” (In other words, don’t punish museums now for what collectors did back then.) Even so, “90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa remains preserved and housed outside of the African continent.” — Apollo
Blog
Why Big Media Couldn’t Extend Copyright Terms Yet Again (And What It Means To The Public Domain)
The rise of the Internet and its remix culture means that a lot of people now benefit from a growing public domain in ways that weren’t true in 1998. That includes big companies like Google, but it also includes grassroots communities like Wikipedia editors and Reddit users. – Ars Technica
A Little Chinese Arthouse Film Sets New Box Office Records — Because Its Marketers Tricked The (Now-Angry) Public
Filmmaker Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, described by a correspondent as a “dreamy pseudo-noir,” grossed nearly $38 million on its first day, nearly unheard of for an art flick in China. How? That first day was Dec. 31, and the producers marketed the film (no relation to the Eugene O’Neill play) as the perfect romantic date flick for New Year’s Eve. The overnight reaction on social media was not pretty. — Variety
Small Niche Cable Channels Are Being Dropped As Audience Flees Cable
The rise of cord-cutting (people ditching cable packages for cheaper digital options) is beginning to reduce financial margins at cable and satellite providers, and channels that aren’t driving a lot of viewership are paying the price. – Axios
The Oscar Niemeyer Modernist Landmark That ‘Could Collapse At Any Time’
There are 15 buildings designed by the Brazilian architect in the 1960s for what was meant to be a permanent international expo in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli. The civil war that started in the ’70s forced planners to abandon the project, and it’s been more or less abandoned ever since. But now that Tripoli is finally reviving, there’s a campaign to revive and rebuild Niemeyer’s complex. — The Guardian
Using Dungeons And Dragons To Teach High Schoolers English Lit
“Instead of assigning the same old essays about Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, [Sarah Roman] wove classroom assignments into an epic adventure for her students to play their way through. By the end of the semester, Roman said her students remembered more about the lessons and had developed relationships with the texts that they wouldn’t have gotten from a standard assignment. — WNYC (New York City)
Opera Star David Daniels Countersues Student Who Alleges Daniels Molested Him
“The [countertenor] filed the suit earlier this month against Andrew Lipian, who accused Daniels of groping him in 2017 in a federal lawsuit which also alleges that the University of Michigan turned a blind eye to allegations of sexual impropriety.” — New York Daily News
Jack Zunz, 94, Engineer Who Made Sydney Opera House Happen
When preparing for construction of architect Jørn Utzon’s design, the Opera House’s original lead engineer could not get his structural calculations for the now-famous roof to work out, and he quit; Zunz took over and used then-new computer modeling techniques to solve the engineering puzzle. And when, during the cost-overrun-plagued construction, Utzon got tired of fighting with politicians and walked away from the project, Zunz saw it through to the end. — The Guardian
Edgar Hilsenrath, Survivor Who Found Black Comedy In Holocaust, Dead At 92
Himself a Holocaust survivor, “[Hilsenrath] chronicled the degradations of the ghettos in one novel and dared to turn genocide into satire in another, selling millions of copies and defying critics who said he was too funny, too gruesome and too vulgar.” — The Washington Post
In A Record-Breaking Week, ‘Hamilton’ Smashes Another Broadway Record
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s juggernaut grossed more than $4 million last week alone, a first for any musical. “The period between Christmas and New Year’s always brings boffo business to Broadway, but even so, the week ending Dec. 30 was the best-attended (378,910 seats filled) and highest-grossing ($57.8 million) in Broadway history. An astonishing 28 shows grossed over $1 million” — including, most unusually, five straight plays. — The New York Times