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Canada Faces A Reckoning Of Its National Cultures

“Blithe celebrations of a national birthday in the art world turned into a fury of self-critique, a rupture in the status quo through which all manner of marginal histories came flooding. Indigenous art in particular came to dominate the scene with major institutions nationwide joining an earnest, long-overdue effort to acknowledge not only its remarkable breadth and power, but the ugly, long-waged, government-sponsored effort to erase it from our national life.”

Artists Heap Scorn On UK Government’s Report Of Impact Of Brexit On Creative Industries

Commenting primarily on the structure of the sector and noting that 6.7% of the workforce in 2016 were EU nationals and there were 2 million jobs in the creative industries, the publication has been met with scorn from the arts sector for glossing over issues such as freedom of movement and refusing to include ‘sector views’. The Committee received these from the Government but “decided not to publish”.

Here’s What Hollywood Should Learn About The Bad Movies It Made This Year

The takeaway? Audiences seem to have grown cynical of the whole Marvel-inspired interlocking universe trope. And in an era when summer moviegoing (the studios’ most reliable money-making time frame) hit a 25-year low, with revenues tumbling more than 14 percent and tying with 2014 for the worst year-over-year decline in modern history, that emphasis on spectacle, formulaic filmmaking, and empire-building (at the expense of creating relatable characters or even coherent story lines) proved to be bad for business.

Defend The Humanities? Why?

Vulgar conservative critiques of the humanities are usually given the greatest exposure, and yet at the same time, it is often political (and religious) conservatives who have labored the most mightily to foster traditional humanistic disciplines in schools. Left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic enquiry—“Western civ and all that”—as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. So the humanities have both Left and Right defenders, Left and Right critics.

A History Of Our Fascination With Prodigies

Ours is an era, a popular parenting adviser has written, when Lake-Wobegon-style insistence on above-average children is “yesterday’s news,” overtaken by an anxious credo that “given half a chance, all of our children would be extraordinary.” Yet versions of today’s uneasy preoccupation with off-the-charts early achievement actually go back further than we think.

The Unlikely Friendship That Produced “The Night Before Christmas”

“On one hand, we have a man of inherited wealth, his way greased by the power and position of his family, but also a man who believed in the public good (even if he didn’t like city hall telling him what to do with his property) and believed in helping struggling artists—and a man, yes, with enough twinkle in his soul to write the world’s most famous poem about Santa Claus—in the spirit of Christmas, let’s be generous and assume he was the author. And then you have a man on the run from his creditors and the law, a toothless, middle-aged immigrant who arrived in this country with little more than a beat-up violin and a few words of broken English.”

Take A Look At The Top Traits Needed To Be Successful Working At Google

“Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas. Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer.”