“Long the stuff of science fiction, so-called ‘seasteading’ has in recent years matured from pure fantasy into something approaching reality, and there are now companies, academics, architects and even a government working together on a prototype by 2020.”
Blog
How Tina Brown Revitalized Legendary Magazines
“At Vanity Fair and then at The New Yorker, she expanded readerships. Her editorial appetites were fierce; she raked in news and new writers and cash. Some people found her style unsettling, and her victories did little to alter that judgment. Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success.”
Why Do We Know So Little About Arts Funding Ecosystems?
“Do major capital campaigns have any effect on fundraising for either their peer groups, or the local field as a whole? Does the existence of an arguably overcrowded field in a particular discipline, affect the fundraising of all the members of that single class? What are the variables in a local funding ecosystem that play a role in the success or failure of the fundraising efforts of all those in the area, and in particular, the efforts of each? Do some efforts result in a cannibalization of scare opportunities, or is the success of anyone a boon to the efforts of all? Does the power inequity work to the disadvantage of some, or is it irrelevant.”
Reconsidering Susan Sontag – Separating A Legend From Her Work
Sontag the personality has grown so large in death that it threatens to eclipse her work: She is remembered as a narcissist, a pugilist, the enemy of Camille Paglia, and a genius.
A Major Restructuring Of Phoenix’s Performing Arts Companies
“Arizona Opera this week is unveiling a daring new programming model that puts the company’s focus squarely on modern works. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix is announcing that it will welcome three new resident companies for the 2018-19 season, doubling the current number.”
Berklee College Of Music President Addresses Reports Of Faculty Sexual Misconduct
“Berklee College of Music president Roger Brown on Monday told a packed campus-wide forum that the renowned school has terminated 11 faculty members in the past 13 years for sexual misconduct. The admission punctuated an extraordinary day at the music school, with hundreds of students, many holding signs, marching down crowded Boylston Street at lunchtime to a gathering to discuss sexual assault and harassment at Berklee.”
College Adjuncts Are Poor. It’s Crippling The System
“Academic precarity is the year-to-year or class-to-class, contingent, underpaid and labor-intensive employment status most Ph.D.s now have to navigate while seeking a protected tenure-track position. After, say, eight years of graduate school, this tacks on another two to four to ten years at a $20-$40,000/year salary. We have crossed over into our thirties and forties in sustained poverty, now separated from our graduate communities and parceled into departments and towns in which we have no belonging or protection.”
Nation Branding: The Art And Business Of Marketing A Country
“In the 21st century, nation branding has grown to be busy business, and its practitioners take great pains to emphasise that what they do is different from the more straightforward marketing and advertising work that came before them. … They regard their line of work as a kind of psychology: counselling for countries, therapy for towns. Look inward, discover yourself, find your place in the world.”
Disney’s LA Times Movie Critic Ban Provoked Confrontations Between Journalists And Times Ownership
“During a daily meeting attended by roughly a dozen editors, a staff member proposed publicizing the two-part investigative series that had precipitated the ban. But Lewis D’Vorkin, the recently installed editor in chief of The Times, flatly rejected the idea, according to several employees with knowledge of the discussion. Later, some journalists received messages by email and Slack warning them against retweeting any praise of Times stories.”
Remember ‘Second Life’? Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Still Spend Hours Living Second Lives On It
Leslie Jamison: “In the years since [the user-generated virtual world’s] peak in the mid 2000s, Second Life has become something more like a magnet for mockery. When I told friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always followed the same trajectory of reactions: a blank expression, a brief flash of recognition, and then a mildly bemused look. Is that still around?” Yet in these crazy days, writes Leslie Jamison, who talks to the platform’s creator and some still-devoted users, “the appeal of that alternate world keeps deepening, along with our doubts about what it means to find ourselves drawn to it.”