Protesting. Even during a global pandemic. Think about that for a second. How furious do people have to be to gather in the streets at a time when a highly infectious disease is killing thousands daily, especially black and brown people, who are dying at disproportionately high rate? – Los Angeles Times
Blog
Will The Pandemic Be An Opportunity Or Will It Tear Us Apart?
Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think. “And when you look at the people who are loudest on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.” – The Atlantic
Leading Thinkers Envision The Post-Pandemic World
“They describe a society that is clear-eyed about the disparities that have made this pandemic so much worse for some communities than for others. They call on us to sustain each other through mutual aid, understanding that our lives are all woven together in ways that may not always have been visible until now. They outline the necessity of protecting democracy, resisting authoritarianism, and paying attention to one another, filling in the spaces left by loss.” – LitHub
Living Your Life Through Aphorisms
Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts to construct systems. Conversely, much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from such grand systems through the construction of literary fragments. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument; the aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of logic; the other by leaps and bounds. – Aeon
Nancy Stark Smith, A Founder Of Contact Improvisation, 68
Ms. Stark Smith, whose signature braid became longer and grayer over time, was also a prolific writer and respected teacher who, beginning in 1990, developed what she called “Underscore,” a structure or framework for practicing long-form dance and improvisation. – The New York Times
Women Making TV Shouldn’t Be A Surprise, And Yet
Yay women doing TV! Also, having to “yay” this means it’s not going that well with the whole ending of inequality thing. “The good news: The number of women working behind the scenes in television is growing. The bad news: It still ain’t great.” – Los Angeles Times
Building A Sanctuary For Culture Lovers
April Gornik and Eric Fischl want to make the Sag Harbor Methodist Church into a community arts center … whenever people can gather again. Fischl: “We have to stop thinking about art as art. We have to start thinking about how the Church can bring creativity to the community on a larger scale.” – The New York Times
You Might Not Know Much About The Mother Of African Cinema
Sarah Maldoror was “a Euro-Caribbean filmmaker trained in the Soviet Union” – and the director, who died of the coronavirus in April of this year, never stopped; “she kept fighting in a world heading in the opposite direction she and her comrades had fought for.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
The Foundation Trying To Help Indie Bookstores Live Through This, And Everything Else
The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (called “Binc”) is a nonprofit created to help booksellers. “Since the pandemic started, Binc has seen requests for assistance increase by 321%. And [communications coordinator] Weiss says she fully expects that number to grow.” – LitHub
Playing Satie’s ‘Vexations’ To Evoke The Spirit Of Our Times
The pianist Igor Levit played a livestream of Erik Satie’s famous, mysterious work, consisting of four lines repeated 840 times, on Sunday. And, well: “The fascinating livestream occasionally slid into something more disturbingly voyeuristic, like witnessing a private crisis of faith and bracing for it to all go wrong.” (It didn’t.) – The New York Times
