The Fiscal Year 2019 Interior Appropriations Bill was approved by the the Senate with a 92-6 vote, after previously being passed by the House of Representatives. The new budget increases funding to the two agencies by $2.2 million compared to the 2018 budget. (That budget was only passed in March, despite the fact that the fiscal year begins in October.) The 2017 budget also included a $2 million increase for the agencies.
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Central Park To Get Its First Statue Of A Woman
There are only five public statues of real women in New York City (excluding fictional characters like Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose), while there are 145 sculptures of men, including statues of William Shakespeare and Ludwig van Beethoven, who are both in Central Park. “We are happy to have broken the bronze ceiling to create the first statue of real women in the 164-year history of Central Park.”
Why ‘Punning Is, In Fact, Among The Highest Displays Of Wit’
Says James Geary, author of Wit’s End, “Puns point to the essence of all true wit — the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. … In poetry, words rhyme; in puns, ideas rhyme. This is the ultimate test of wittiness, keeping your balance even when you’re of two minds.”
An Orchestral Musician’s View of Community Engagement: I
“Over the last twenty years I have played for children and adults with special needs, dementia patients, hospitalized children, grieving parents, and veterans in rehab or hospice. …” A guest post by Penny Brill, an alumna of the Community Engagement Training offered by ArtsEngaged.
Weekend Listening Tip: Terrell Stafford Quintet
As the Rifftides staff heads back from vacation, they want to be sure that you’re up to date on listening opportunities. So they customized this announcement from Jim Wilke about his next presentation on Jazz Northwest.
Britain’s Womad World Music Festival Was Hurt By Visa Issues. Is This The Brexit Future?
“Do we really want a white-breaded, Brexited flatland? A country that is losing the will to welcome the world? The ‘hostile environment’ took its toll at Womad … a number of events were seriously affected by visa refusals. By definition, a festival of world music requires visas for many bands. What on Earth is the Home Office doing refusing them? Is music the new enemy?”
Antonio Dias, 74, Artist Who Battled Brazil’s Military Dictators
“In the mid-1960s Mr. Dias emerged as the leading figure of Nova Figuração, or ‘New Figuration,’ a movement in Brazilian painting that used bold, graphic imagery to contest Brazil’s junta, which took power in 1964. … [In 1968,] he moved to Milan, where he abandoned his graphic and immediate paintings for an art of cool conceptualism, though his political engagement never wavered.”
Why The Social Media Platforms Are Going To Lose Their InfoWars Battles
The battle over InfoWars illustrates how what was once these tech giants’ greatest strength has become their greatest weakness. For years, Facebook and YouTube spent so much time defending anyone’s right to say almost anything on their platforms, they forgot to remind users that it wasn’t really a question of rights at all. Only the government can violate a person’s First Amendment rights, however wrong or hateful that person may be.
Where Art And Activism Meet, And Why They Can’t Merge
“In their mandate to be awake to life, and to awaken others, the sympathies of artists and activists seemingly align. But in the activist context, awake becomes ‘woke’ — not a personal practice of observation and a transmutation within form, but a communal decision in service of a desired change. This ‘in service of’ is the sticking point for artists.” (At the end of that road lies Socialist Realism.) Arielle Angel looks back at her many attempts to unite art and activism on equal terms — and her questions about whether, in the current moment, the former is a luxury she should give up in favor of the latter.
Are You Ready For The Information Wars?
We discuss counter-messaging, treating this as a problem of false stories rather than as an attack on our information ecosystem. We find ourselves in the midst of an arms race, in which responsibility for the integrity of public discourse is largely the hands of private social platforms, and determined adversaries continually find new ways to manipulate features and circumvent security measures. Addressing computational propaganda and disinformation is not about arbitrating truth. It’s about responding to information warfare.