“Disney’s latest move points toward a potential future in which every entertainment conglomerate has its own service. Maybe these services will umbrella a number of different properties — like how a Fox streaming bundle could potentially include the network, the studio, FX, and Fox Sports 1 — but consumers might need to start making some hard decisions about which providers they’re really willing to pay for, in a way they never had to in the days of all-inclusive cable packages.”
Blog
When Art Of The Present Tries To Compete With Art Of The Past – It’s An Act Of Blindness
“Modern Painters, Old Masters argues persuasively that artists have succeeded in reimagining earlier work without engaging in aggressive competition—the kind that Édouard Manet, for example, appears to have relished when he transformed the softly modeled nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) into the flat planes of a defiantly naked Olympia (1863)… Like the nineteenth century, our own moment is one at which the expansion of museums and new technologies for the dissemination of images have combined to make the history of art-making open to view as never before.”
The Importance Of Grasping The Long Sweep Of History
“When we find ourselves taking a childlike view of our place in history, we would do well to take a lesson from those scribes of 3,000 years ago, and recognise that the timeline stretches as far behind us as it stretches ahead. For proof of this, we have only to look to Eridu and Pompeii and Tenochtitlan, and a hundred other dust-swept ruins whose inhabitants hoped their empires would endure forever – but must have known, on some level, that they would not.”
First Person Account: The New Republic As A Cautionary Journalism Tale
“Data have turned journalism into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, calibrated. Perhaps people in the media have always thought this way. But if that impulse existed, it was at least buffered. Journalism’s leaders were vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the cause for fanaticism about building such a thick wall between the two.”
Think You Can Tell Emotion By Someone’s Body Language? Science Says No
“Copious research, from my lab and others, shows that faces and bodies alone do not communicate any specific emotion in any consistent manner. In addition, we now know that the brain doesn’t have separate processes for emotion and cognition, and therefore one cannot control the other. If these statements defy your common sense, I’m right there with you. But our experiences of emotion, no matter how compelling, don’t reflect the biology of what’s happening inside us. Our traditional understanding and practice of emotional intelligence badly needs a tuneup.”
Read Annie Dillard’s Classic Essay About Solar Eclipses
“I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”
In honor of this month’s event, The Atlantic brings back Dillard’s 1982 piece “Total Eclipse.”
Is Disney Reinventing Its Business Model And Becoming A Streaming Service?
It is a big deal to hear the CEO of a giant, publicly traded media company say he’s going to fundamentally shift his business model: “Obviously, as you move product from … a licensed-to-third-party model to a self-distributed model, you’re foregoing the licensing revenue that you get for whatever revenues you generate by [selling it yourself].”
Resurrecting The Most Legendary Musical In South Africa’s History (It Was Suppressed Under Apartheid)
“Nelson and Winnie Mandela were in the crowd. Miriam Makeba was the female lead. Abdullah Ibrahim played inconspicuously in the orchestra, as did a teenage Hugh Masekela, on a trumpet given to him by Louis Armstrong. Thrilled by what they saw and heard, the audience members, at first roped into ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ sections, refused to leave the theater after the show … On the opening night of the musical King Kong [in 1959], a black composer, Todd Matshikiza; a white creative team; and a 72-strong black cast offered the audience a vision of another kind of country, in which creativity and collaboration prevailed.” After nearly 60 years, King Kong is being updated and revived in Cape Town.
The Santa Monica Symphony Invited A Conservative Talk Radio Host To Conduct A Fundraiser. Cue Protests
The “decision caused immediate outrage among some members of the symphony, and a number of them are refusing to play the fund-raiser, saying that allowing the orchestra to be conducted by Mr. Prager, who has suggested that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest, among other contentious statements, would be tantamount to endorsing and normalizing bigotry. Some are even encouraging others not to attend the concert.”
Half A Century After ‘The Twilight Zone’, Single-Episode Anthology Series Are Back On TV
“Golden-age classics such as The Twilight Zone and Playhouse 90 … delivered a full-course narrative meal within as little as 30 minutes. It was one of the great TV genres, until it wasn’t.” (Yeah, there was also The Love Boat.) Now, with the likes of Netflix’s Black Mirror and the Duplass brothers’ Room 104 on HBO, “all of a sudden, short-form storytelling has found its way back onto the TV menu – and the reasons why have a lot to do with the ripple effects of Peak TV.”