Claims of bullying emerged from dancers at the company last year, coinciding with the departure of a several dancers: almost half the dancers either left or did not have their contracts renewed over the space of about six months.
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Ten Women Conductors Making Their Marks
No longer entirely a male preserve, orchestras are changing, and women conductors are increasingly making their marks.
Big Canadian Music Festival On Hold Because Of… Some Birds
Workers discovered the bird, a killdeer, guarding her four eggs while they were setting up one of the festival’s main stages. The breed is protected by the Canadian government and cannot be moved without federal permission.
Is The Latest Crop Of Gay Movies Erasing Gay Culture?
Tom Joudrey thinks so: “Gone unnoticed amidst this flurry of jubilation [for the likes of Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon] has been, against my post-Brokeback hopes a dozen years ago, … a sort of amnesia that makes queerness blithely complicit in its own extinction. I realize this argument might be hard to follow, particularly amidst our post-Obergefell triumphalism, so it’s worth looking more closely into how queer films fell into a bad romance with straight validation.”
An Oral History Of Saturday Night Live’s ‘Black Jeopardy’
Writers Bryan Tucker and Michael Che (who created the sketch) and Kenan Thompson (who plays the Alex Trebek equivalent) talk about the genesis of the idea, the challenge of creating characters for various guest hosts, and the sketches they wanted to do but didn’t (yet). (includes video clips)
How Social Media Platforms Have Turned Into Battlebots Of The Culture Wars
Though the brigading of review sites and doxxing behavior isn’t exactly new, the speed and coordination is; one consequence of a never-ending information war is that everyone is already well versed in their specific roles. And across the internet, it appears that technology platforms, both big and small, must grapple with the reality that they are now powerful instruments in an increasingly toxic political and cultural battle.
Closure Of Celebrated Rio Music Nightclub Becomes Symbol Of Brazil’s Crises
“It was Rio’s equivalent of the Blue Note or Ronnie Scott’s, a legendary downtown samba club famed for its caipirinha-fuelled jam sessions and for spawning some of the best young musicians in town. Today, though, Bar Semente lies abandoned, a graffiti-covered symbol of the city’s post-mega-event slump. An epitaph has been sprayed on its facade: ‘The Olympics, for who?'”
What It’s Like To Be Jonathan Franzen Today
What had he done that was so wrong? Here he was, in his essays and interviews, making informed, nuanced arguments about the way we live now — about anything from Twitter (which he is against) to the way political correctness has been weaponized to shut down discourse (which he is against) to obligatory self-promotion (which he is against) to the incessant ending of a phone call by saying, “I love you” (which he is against, but because “I love you” is for private) — and though critics loved him and he had a devoted readership, others were using the very mechanisms and platforms that he warned against (like the internet in general and social media in specific) to ridicule him.
How Armenian Folk Dance Helped Sustain The Diaspora
“‘The two means of expression, outside of being a member of the church, to mark you as an Armenian are dance and food,’ [dance historian] Gary Lind-Sinanian says. ‘Those are the two every Armenian family practices to some degree.’ Still, every village seemed to have its own style, he said. ‘When people make their pilgrimages to some monastery for a festival, they could see, when various groups danced to a melody, by the way they danced, you could tell where they came from. It still happens today at Armenian-American conventions. You could have a dance taking place, and someone familiar with regional dances could go through it and say, ‘Oh, that group is from Fresno, they’re from Los Angeles, that’s Chicago, that’s Philadelphia, that’s Boston.””
Words Matter: Why Ayn Rand Is Still A Bestseller (And How To Deal With It)
Hoping that Rand’s ideas will, in time, just go away is not a good solution to the problem. The Fountainhead is still a bestseller, 75 years since first publication. And perhaps it’s time to admit that Rand is a philosopher – just not a very good one. It should be easy to show what is wrong with her thinking, and also to recognise, as John Stuart Mill did in On Liberty (1859), that a largely mistaken position can still contain some small elements of truth, as well as serving as a stimulus to thought by provoking us to demonstrate what is wrong with it.