“The very nature of Bollywood films is changing. Though big-budget films are by no means extinct, such productions are increasingly viewed as financial gambles that must compete with the wider range of high-quality options available to viewers. Even if quite a few Bollywood releases have sold more tickets by virtue of their wider releases, it’s the smaller, more critically acclaimed releases like Newton and Hindi Medium that were among 2017’s most profitable films. This apparent shift has been underway for the past decade—it’s the sense of panic gripping the industry that is new.”
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Elementary School Teacher Fired After Allowing Students To See Pictures Of Classic Art Including Nudity
“The saga began when Mateo Rueda had fifth and sixth grade students do a color study exercise. In the last few minutes of class, Rueda had students go to the library and look through art books and boxes of postcards so they could select which paintings best exemplified the color relationships they had been studying. That’s when Rueda realized that some of the postcards, which he claims had been in the library long before he started teaching there, included some nude paintings, including Iris Tree, by Amedeo Modigliani, François Boucher’s Brown Odalisque, and The Valpincon Bather by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.”
How Futurists In 1968 Envisioned 2018
“Much of [the book] Toward the Year 2018 might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from ‘Space’ to ‘Behavioral Technologies,’ it’s not hard to find wild misses. … But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark.”
A New Golden Age For Soul (And What That Looks Like)
“For much of the 2010s, the charts have been dominated by pop stars who weren’t necessarily delivering the most personalized, introspective music. Big productions and a litany of guest appearances on every release undermined the impact of singer-songwriters, as artists like Jazmine Sullivan and Bilal remained on the fringes of the mainstream. But this year, the pendulum swung for sincerity. Black singer-songwriters once again are redefining popular music and reshaping contemporary soul.”
‘My Ideal Theatre’: Playwright David Hare Dares To Dream
For a start, “the ideal theatre – let’s call it the Playhouse – will not be in the centre of London. It will be in a place where people actually live. That means either a regional city or a residential district in the capital.”
Gia Kourlas Learns To Look At Dance Differently
“The dance world tends to compartmentalize itself: There is uptown dance (code word for ballet) or downtown dance (the more experimental variety). I follow both and everything in between. What am I looking for in terms of any kind of performance? Imagination. To see how a choreographer thinks, how a dancer responds and how the art of theater creates an atmosphere.”
Some Of The Best Dancers In New York Work For The NBA
“Sure, New York City is home to lots of dance troupes, but if you’re a dance fan these two groups may not even be on your radar. Don’t be a snob. The Brooklynettes and the Knicks City Dancers perform intricate choreography during the breaks between quarters of pro-basketball games, in arenas with 360-degree views. And they are not messing around.”
“All Of A Sudden We Can Do The Same Kind Of Analysis On Images As We Can On Text”
“For the first time, helped by recent advances in artificial intelligence, researchers are able to analyze large quantities of images, pulling out data that can be sorted and mined to predict things like income, political leanings and buying habits. In the Stanford study, computers collected details about cars in the millions of images it processed, including makes and models.”
When A Film Critic Watches A Movie About Events He Was There For
Kenneth Turan on watching The Post and All The President’s Men: “Experiencing that as an adult, and as a critic, has been more complex, even unnerving, and different every time. My range of reactions have also given me insights into what films do and how they do it that I may not have gotten absent that personal connection.”
The Performance Art Installation That Sums Up 2017, And Maybe The Human Condition
Wesley Morris writes about Yoann Bourgeois’s The Mechanics of History, which features men continually climbing a staircase, falling onto a trampoline, and bouncing back onto the stairs – all on a slowly rotating program. (Morris saw it at, of all places, Paris’s Panthéon.)