“Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves” – often waged by people who haven’t read the novel they’re condemning – “are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading.”
Blog
Public Broadcaster Sues LaVar Burton Over “Reading Rainbow”
The suit alleges “copyright infringement, conversion, cybersquatting, violations of the Lanham Act, breach of contract and interference with customer relations,” and seeks profits from LeVar Burton Reads, which Burton did describe on the podcast itself as “a Reading Rainbow for adults.”
Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Pankaj Mishra, And Others On The Partition Of The Indian Subcontinent, 70 Years Later
“More than a million were killed and many millions more displaced by Indian partition. [Eleven] authors consider its bloody legacy and the crises now facing their countries.”
A Professional Fringe Theatre Out To Redefine What Success Is
“We are a professional theatre company who happens to perform in alternative spaces. Just because our shows are free does not mean we are inferior in quality. Just because we aren’t playing at the Boston Center for the Arts doesn’t mean we are unprofessional, or underfinanced. We have been around for seven years, and we pay our artists decent wages. We are working very hard to redefine fringe and redefine what it means to be a professional theatre company.”
How America Lost Its Mind: Our Current ‘Post-Truth’ Moment Has Roots As Deep And Old As The U.S. Itself
Kurt Andersen: “The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. … Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
Nothing New: Celebrity Culture Has Always Been With Us
“Antoine Lilti’s The Invention of Celebrity is a book that does just that. A chronicle of the origins and development of our modern société du spectacle, it provides a genealogy of the media-driven world of celebrities and personalities who now dominate our headlines and crowd (out) our public debates. Far from being the product solely of 20th-century developments or the perversion of a less starstruck age, argues Lilti, the culture of celebrity has in fact been with us since the 18th century. ‘Celebrity’, Lilti writes, is ‘a characteristic trait of modern societies’. It was present at their birth.”
Are Dancers’ Brains Wired Differently? Evidently So
Recent studies “reveal that dancers use multiple areas of their brains simultaneously while dancing: one part controls movement without expressive intention, another part imagines movement qualities and these parts work to execute movement while also making higher-level decisions.”
Truth Or Opinion? Just Because We’re “Entitled” To Our Opinions Doesn’t Make Them Right
The notion that the metaphorical “court of public opinion” should be a truth-seeking body was chucked overboard long ago. Today, a peculiar, pluralistic ideology dominates the “free market(place) of ideas”—an ideology cast in the same mold as liberal multiculturalism. The noblest virtue of this ideology, we’re taught, is not the bare-knuckle struggle for truth, but the equal protection and representation of variegated perspectives and identities, especially those that have been historically excluded from the mainstream (or feel like they have been).
Peter Martins’s And Darci Kistler’s Daughter Arrested For Felony Burglary
Talicia Martins, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Bard College, and a friend allegedly broke into three storefront businesses in Camden, Maine and stole more than $1,000. Both have been charged with burglary and felony theft.
The ‘Chicago Picasso’ At 50
The towering, untitled sculpture was not universally popular when it was unveiled 50 years ago. “[It] might never have been in danger of being destroyed or being replaced with a statue of Cubs baseball player Ernie Banks (per the wishes of one alderman), but for several years, the word ‘controversial’ preceded any mention of the work in the press. … Children began using The Picasso as a slide almost immediately, making it a de facto interactive sculpture.”