Yung Phil and his crew Turf Feinz may work the BART trains in and around San Francisco, but only between gigs for commercials, music videos, and concert tours. “We’re using [the subways] as another outlet,” he tells Jennifer Stahl. “It’s not just about trying to get a quick dollar. We try to push the movement, we try to push the culture forward.” – Dance Magazine
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Staff At Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Say Director’s Firing Was Justified
Nathalie Bondil was ousted on 13 July by the museum’s board of directors, which cited “disturbing” reports from staff members about a “toxic” workplace atmosphere. The dismissal followed an investigation into the employee allegations that the board commissioned from a consulting firm. – The Art Newspaper
So Who Was ‘Jim Crow’, Anyway?
As you might guess, that’s not the name of any real person. Jim Crow was, arguably, the original minstrel show character. The performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-1860) didn’t invent minstrelsy, but he was its first famous practitioner, and Jim Crow was his (grotesquely stereotyped) blackface persona. – Mental Floss
How Swedish Culture Explains Its Response To COVID
It also helps explain the Swedish policy response to Covid-19 — banning gatherings over 50, encouraging home working and social distancing, shielding of vulnerable groups, while keeping society as open as possible — which can be seen as typically lagom. It was designed to be proportionate to the threat, but unhysterical, and sustainable over the long term. To rip up a long-prepared pandemic plan and impose unprecedented measures just because everybody else was would be considered reckless; to close schools would have been considered morally unacceptable. – Unherd
Matt Herron, Photojournalist Who Documented Civil Rights Struggle In Deep South, Dead At 89
“A child of the Depression and a protégé of the Dust Bowl documentarian Dorothea Lange, Mr. Herron assembled a team of photographers to capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters, aided by their white Freedom Rider allies, as they sought to claim the rights they had been legally granted a century before.” – The New York Times
Why Exams Continue To Be The Gold Standard For Education
Many of the criticisms levelled at exams as a framework for learning and a means of assessment have validity. There have been valiant attempts over the years to provide a balance between formal assessment and coursework-based, teacher-assessed learning, and this trend rightly continues in many vocational and technical courses. However, despite their drawbacks, exams do encourage and promote a much wider set of skills and values than is often acknowledged by their child-centred opponents. – Unherd
The Anonymous Armies Of Culture Cops Who Actually Police The Internet
“What sometimes gets obscured is the fact that many online-censorship decisions are made not by powerful actors” — for instance, senior execs at Facebook or Twitter — “imposing their will on average internet denizens, but by an army of users who have, in effect, been deputized as censors” — for instance, moderators at Reddit or the people who report tweets they find offensive to Twitter. “This massive, mostly anonymous and pseudonymous group of internet culture cops is doing a large and likely growing share of the daily work of content-policing.” Jesse Singal looks into who they are and why they do it. – Nautilus
If COVID Means Audiences Can’t Sit Through These Shows, Then They Can Walk Through Them
“Now several companies are attempting variations on what is sometimes called promenade theater — outdoor productions in which audiences move as they follow the action. The form — a cousin to street theater — has a long tradition, particularly in Europe, but has new appeal in the United States this summer because of the relative ease of keeping patrons apart outdoors.” – The New York Times
Five Months Into The Pandemic, How Are The National Theatres In England, Scotland, And Wales Holding Up?
Some better than others. The big, building-based, high-overhead companies in England, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Co., are “haemorrhaging money,” while their smaller counterparts in Wales and Scotland, without theatre buildings to maintain, are doing surprisingly well. Lyn Gardner reports. – The Stage
Antitrust Rules Against Studios Owning Movie Theaters Struck Down (Will That Save The Theaters?)
Known as the Paramount Consent Degrees, the regulations followed from a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering Hollywood studios to sell off their national cinema chains; a US District Court judge has ruled that the current distribution landscape, including streaming, means those rules are no longer necessary. With chains reeling from the coronavirus lockdown (and AMC in particular facing bankruptcy), maybe Amazon and Netflix should just buy themselves chains? (Disney, no doubt, will.) – Wired