If the body-shaming tactics allegedly employed by many NBA dance teams are troubling, the dancers’ stories suggest that the compensation is worse. Three women remembered getting paid $50 a game; one said she took home $65. Three others said they made just $25 a practice, and one said that she and her teammates weren’t paid for practice at all. To put all that in perspective, the average price of a single NBA ticket during the 2012-2013 season (the earliest year this salary was mentioned) was $50. – Yahoo News
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The Semi-Secret Bootleg Video Vans Of The Soviet Union
Elmar Hashimov writes about how he and his peers, the last generation of kids to grow up in the USSR, watched still-illegal American films (and learned English) on VHS tapes, dubbed on the down-low, inside parked transit vans tricked out with a TV and VCR. — The Atlantic
Fortnite Made Dance Moves Fabulously Lucrative. So Now The Courts Have To Figure Out Who Owns What
“There’s no definitive case law determining this.” When the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed, it finally established rules around choreography, with some limited fair use cases around criticism and dance education. Strangely enough, it covered even pantomime, but not an individual dance move as we’ve culturally come to understand it in the ensuing decades. – The Verge
New Awards, And A New Sense Of Community, For Chicago’s Latinx Theatermakers
“Latinx theatre and theatremakers in Chicago are consistently ignored, erased, or misunderstood by both critics at mainstream publications and the city’s one major awards body, the Joseph Jefferson Awards. And this is not to mention the wider demonization of Latinx people by the current political administration and the long history of racism and state violence facing people of color that is endemic to the United States. The ALTAs” — presented and produced by the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists of Chicago — “were a response to a deeply felt need by the community and offered an alternative to majority-white modes of professional recognition and prestige.” — HowlRound
An Independent Seattle Bookstore That’s Thriving On Community
Beloved Seattle bookstores were closing their doors throughout the aughts, and those who remained open seemed to face an impossibly uphill task — who would pay full price for a book when you could buy it for less online? But there’s more to an indie bookstore than the price on a book’s cover. In a manner worthy of a great writer’s unexpected third-act twist, independent bookstores have made an improbable comeback in the past few years, both nationally and locally. – Seattle Times
Has Twitter Made This A Golden Age Of Aphorism?
“‘You’d think so,’ says the poet and aphorist Don Paterson. ‘But there’s absolutely no evidence of it.’ As he sees it, the aphorism is a different thing altogether from what he calls ‘wisdom literature’. Yet aphorisms – even though they haven’t much of a tradition in the anglophone world – are poking green shoots into the likes of Waterstone’s.” — The Guardian
Beyond Scrooge: Charles Dickens’s Strong, Strange Relationship With Christmas
“From his early short essay ‘A Christmas Dinner’ in Sketches by Boz (1836) to his incomplete final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), in which an uncle appears to have murdered his nephew on Christmas Day, Christmas is sunk into his imagination like a watermark. … [And some friends] observed that Dickens’s enjoyment of Christmas seemed more determined, even ruthless, than one might expect from someone with a genuinely boyish sense of fun.” — Literary Hub
David Shepherd, Granddaddy Of Chicago Improv, Dead At 94
In 1955, Shepherd co-founded Compass Players with Paul Sills, and, as one comedy historian put it, “Without David, no Compass. Without Compass, no Second City.” Which means no North American improv or sketch comedy as we know it. — Chicago Tribune
No Selling Of Secondhand Digital Recordings The Way You Can Sell Your CDs And LPs, Rules Federal Court
A company called ReDigi had developed a platform for people to offer their “pre-owned” MP3s and FLACs while making sure that the sellers didn’t keep a bootleg copy for themselves — or so they thought. Capitol Records sued, and now a federal district court and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that ReDidi’s business model is illegal. Cullen Seltzer explains. — Slate
NPR Develops Open-Source Tool For Getting Podcast User Data, And Feelings Are, Well, Mixed
Until now, the only tools for telling how long users actually listened to the podcasts they downloaded were the proprietary ones of Apple and Spotify. So NPR developed an open-source tool to get data beyond download figures. But with the privacy scandals that have broken over the past year, some podcasters are leery. — Columbia Journalism Review