The rise has been fuelled by the growth of psychological thrillers and the success of big names like Lee Child, James Patterson and Dan Brown. Last year, 18.7 million crime books were sold – 19% more than in 2015, data company Nielsen Bookscan says. They overtook sales for general and literary fiction, which were down 16%.
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Inside Milan’s Retirement Home For Old Musicians
Casa Verdi is “a sumptuous neo-Gothic mansion built in central Milan by Verdi. Completed in 1899, the building was created as a sanctuary for musicians who found themselves poverty-stricken in old age, “Old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young, did not possess the virtue of saving,” as Verdi wrote in a letter at the time.”
Some Of YouTube’s Most Popular Videos Are Hacked
Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s Despacito is the most viewed YouTube video of all time, with more than 5bn views, but temporarily disappeared from the site and had its hold image replaced by a photograph of a masked gang holding guns. Hackers calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh replaced the description beneath the video with: “Free Palestine.”
UK Music Companies Have Their Best Year In Decades
UK record labels enjoyed a 10.6% surge in earnings in 2017 to £839m, thanks to the digital popularity of a new generation of artists including Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Dua Lipa and Stormzy. It was the fastest growth since 1995, when Oasis, Blur and Pulp created a high-street CD sales frenzy. Music companies enjoyed a 45% year-on-year increase in subscription streaming revenue – from £239m in 2016 to £347m – as an industry hammered for a decade by illegal piracy now enjoys the success of music lovers turning to legitimate services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.
We All Depend On Online Recommendation Engines. But They’re Broken
Today, recommendation engines are perhaps the biggest threat to societal cohesion on the internet—and, as a result, one of the biggest threats to societal cohesion in the offline world, too. The recommendation engines we engage with are broken in ways that have grave consequences: amplified conspiracy theories, gamified news, nonsense infiltrating mainstream discourse, misinformed voters. Recommendation engines have become The Great Polarizer.
Entertainment Companies Reported Their Gender Pay Gaps. It Isn’t Pretty
Much of the media focus has been on the size of the salary gaps. But what really tells the story about ingrained gender inequality is the disparity in bonus pay (men receive 67% more than women at Warner Bros., 88% at Live Nation, 68% at Turner Broadcasting) and the disproportion of men — usually in the region of 70% — in the upper quartile of earners.
A Superhero Movie Where The Superpowers Come From Sign Language
In Sign Gene, the first feature by deaf filmmaker Emilio Insolera, “the plot centers on an international band of deaf people, who, thanks to a genetic mutation, can channel superpowers through their use of sign language. The independent film is a fast-paced, genre-bending romp, shot on three continents with a cast made up entirely of deaf actors and CODAs (meaning children of deaf adults).”
Washington’s Holocaust Museum Announces Billion-Dollar Fundraising Goal
The fundraising goal is gutsy for an organization of the Holocaust Museum’s size and relative youth. Its operating expenses were $116 million in 2016, according to tax filings that reported a federal grant of $53 million. In comparison, the Smithsonian Institution, which completed a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign last year, reported its annual budget at about $1.3 billion, or 13 times that of the Holocaust Museum.
Why Is It So Difficult For Women Artists To Get The Attention They’re Due?
One of the biggest stories in the art world in the past two or three years has been the rapidly growing number of female artists who are getting solo shows, career surveys and retrospectives at well-known museums. But at America’s biggest and most prestigious museums, the pace of change can seem dismayingly slow.
Unpublished J.R.R. Tolkien Book To Hit Shelves This Summer
“JRR Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin, his tale of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces which the Lord of the Rings< .em> author called ‘the first real story’ of Middle-earth, will be published in August. [It] will be the second ‘new’ Tolkien work to be released in two years, following the release of Beren and Lúthien in May 2017.”