It finds that news consumers are more trusting of the media—and more secure about their own ability to discern the truth—when they are exposed to a combination of fact-checking articles and opinion pieces arguing for the importance of journalism. “When one side attacks over and over again, and the other doesn’t respond, at some point people assume that journalists have conceded the point that they’re biased.” – Pacific Standard
Blog
Queering Cambodian Classical Dance
Prumsodun Ok is a Cambodian-American who studied Khmer court dance in the US and ultimately in Phnom Penh. Now he’s the founding artistic director of Natyarasa, Cambodia’s first LGBTQ dance company, which performs traditional dances in (what’s the best word?) gender-fluid form as well as newly-created works. (video) — Atlas Obscura
Recent Listening In Brief: Christmas Music
Laura Dickinson 17: Auld Lang Syne (Music & Mirror Records)
David Ian: Vintage Christmas (Prescott Records)
Jake Ehrenreich, with the Roger Kellaway Trio,
A Treausury of Jewish Christmas Songs (Ehrenreich)
— Doug Ramsey
Reality as a Metaphysical Construct
It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Jürgen Ploog’s Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. — Jan Herman
Seattle Opera Has A New Home
The 105,000-square-foot building, at Mercer Street and Fourth Avenue North next to McCaw Hall, is designed to allow people to take a peek behind the scenes, with walls of glass allowing the public to see performances and lectures in progress, and a viewing garden where people can watch those at work in the costume shop. – Seattle Times
How The Lost Short Stories Of Naguib Mahfouz Were Rediscovered And Published (And Lost In The First Place)
The Nobel laureate had evidently intended to publish them sometime in 1994. Then he lost track of them after a very, very bad day. Two decades on, a critic in Cairo came upon them while searching for something else entirely. — Literary Hub
Walmart Buys Art.com
Initially Art.com will operate independently as a standalone company, but the announcement states that soon Art.com’s collection of two million images ranging from posters to limited-edition prints on paper and canvas, as well as frames, wall décor and custom framing services for uploaded photographs, will be added to the Walmart.com, Jet.com and Hayneedle.com sites. – Forbes
Atlanta’s Monumental Piece Of Civil War Propaganda Art Is Being Restored To Tell The Truth
No, this isn’t Stone Mountain. It’s “the largest palimpsest of Civil War memory to be found anywhere on planet Earth — the Atlanta Cyclorama, one of the great wonders of the postmodern world.” Which is to say, it’s an enormous 360-degree painting, once a major tourist attraction, that was painted over repeatedly to change the narrative and show one side or the other as winning. — Smithsonian Magazine
My Challenges: Mental Illness And Theatre
Jacob Juntunen: “Being a mentally ill theatremaker comes with its own specific challenges. Different mental illnesses require different care, but the majority are exacerbated by lack of routine, insufficient sleep, alcohol use, lack of access to health care, and undue stress—all elements of most theatre careers. Mental illnesses are chronic, requiring a redefinition of self after diagnosis, a lifetime of management, and the navigation of a complicated healthcare system.” – Howlround
In Praise Of The Long And Complicated Sentence
“The style guides say: keep your sentences short. … But sometimes a sentence just needs to be long. The world resists our efforts to enclose it between a capital and a full stop. The sentence has to withhold its end because life is like that, refusing to fold itself neatly into subject, verb and object.” — Literary Hub