“The play’s lead actor, Mohamad Alrefai, showed up for his first interview at the United States Embassy in Beirut eager to introduce himself and to show his supporting documents for a visa, only to be told by an American consular official to keep his mouth shut, he recalled, and his stack of papers to himself. Several members of the group were asked to furnish their social media handles so American officials could read what they had posted. The director, Omar Abusaada, said he was asked if he belonged to a terrorist organization. “Would an actual terrorist say yes?” he later wondered aloud.”
Blog
“Game Of Thrones” Is A Global Blockbuster Phenomenon. Here’s How That Happened
“We’d expect changes wrought by the internet to have played a key role. They did, but not in the way you’d expect. HBO didn’t use the internet to distribute “Game of Thrones” to subscribers around the world like Netflix and Amazon Video have done with their series. Instead, the internet was important to the series’ global growth because of the opportunities it gave fans to interact with one another.”
Experts: Social Media Is Dumbing Down Our Communication
Experts who look into such things say that while social networking has its benefits — professionally, personally, politically — it’s also dumbing down the ways people communicate with each other. Having so many channels of communication has overwhelmed our ability to thoughtfully interact online, encouraging cheap and easy forms of communication.
In Tucson, A Trial Over The Right To Teach Kids About Their Histories And Cultures
A week into a federal trial over whether a law preventing Tuscon from teaching elective ethnic studies classes was racially motivated, the former head of public instruction, one of the strongest supporters of the ban, “reaffirmed things like saying that Spanish language media should be banned from the United States with a limited exception of Mexican restaurant menus.”
Neuroscience Is Confirming Why Some Buildings Work And Some Don’t
“I realized that our paradigm of understanding how people experience their environments had radically shifted, and no one had really figured out what this meant. One of the things I found was that, basically, [given] what we now know about human cognition and perception, the built environments we inhabit are drastically more important than we ever thought they were.”
Evil Robot Masters Are Ruining Theatre Tickets, And Maybe The World As Well
Don’t read this piece if you ever want to sleep again. “Today’s impersonation-bots are different from the robots imagined in science fiction: They aren’t sentient, don’t carry weapons and don’t have physical bodies. Instead, fake humans just have whatever is necessary to make them seem human enough to ‘pass.'”
Watching A Former Literary Icon Fall Out Of Fashion
What happened to reading Rebecca West? Her 1941 nonfiction “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” was often listen as a top nonfiction book of the 20th century … and then somehow the book, “an attack on empire, a defense of small nations, and an embrace of concrete delights over abstract causes,” passed its 75th anniversary with nary a notice, even from the International Rebecca West Society.
A Few Things You May Not Know About ‘The Scream’
For instance: “The U.S. Department of Energy proposed to use an image of the face at the nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain to warn future explorers of radioactive waste.”
The British Actor Who Altered His Career – And The Narrative Around Gay Men – For One 1961 Film
“Before Victim, [Dick Bogarde] was ‘the idol of the Odeons,’ the biggest movie star in the land. But he willingly relinquished that status for Victim. Even more jolting than hearing the word ‘homosexual,’ must have been hearing Bogarde confess to Syms, ‘I wanted him!’ – a jolt of erotic passion even heterosexual movies of the era would avoid.”
Playwrights, Designers, And Even NYT Critics Are Trying To End ‘Theatrical Manspreading’
Laura Collins-Hughes: “The capacity to take women seriously is at the heart of all of this: the idea that we’re not an aberration but half the population, and just as human as the other half. It is ridiculous to me that the need for equal footing even has to be a discussion — that the inherent value of a theater that looks and sounds and feels like all of us should require defending.”