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How To Pandemic-Proof Our Griefstricken, Routine-Longing Brains And Hearts

It’s not easy, knowing familiar holidays are here and we just can’t expect to celebrate them the same way. “Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Not only is there the seeming capriciousness of the virus, but we no longer have the routines that served as the familiar scaffolding of our lives.” But now, knowing some things about our new lives, we have to create new routines. – The New York Times

And Yet, A Live Performance Truly Beats Livestreaming

Ireland is reopening in some ways, but arts venues are expecting a third wave of coronavirus infections and another shutdown after Christmas. How should they plan? “Covid-19 has profoundly changed parts of our world. Business travel has been killed by the Zoom call. The absurdity of the daily rush hour has been exposed by home working. Some of these changes may turn out to be permanent. But when it comes to art and culture, lockdown has revealed a contrary truth: live will always be better than livestream.” – Irish Times

A Century Of The Widening Gyre

One hundred years after the last massive, worldwide pandemic, Yeats’ poem feels close at hand. “I would scarcely call ‘The Second Coming’ a holiday poem. But it makes you feel that that a page of history is about to flip: one epoch is about to give birth to another.” – NPR

What Fairytale Of New York And It’s A Wonderful Life Have In Common

And what they tell us about a culture that celebrates Christmas above all, decontextualizing the artists’ other work. “The Pogues had already put out two of the most original albums of the decade by the time they released ‘Fairytale’ in 1987; I can’t remember the last time I heard anything from either played on the radio. Were Frank Capra around today, he would be able to relate.” – The Guardian (UK)

The UK’s Culture Secretary Asks Netflix To Label ‘The Crown’ As Fiction

Who would write this twist into the series? Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden “is expected to write Netflix a formal request that a label is added to the beginning of each episode, clearly stating that the series is fictionalized. Dowden’s demands echo worries that the series will do lasting damage to the image of the British monarchy.” Ahem. – Variety

Just Say No To Hillbilly Elegy

As nearly every reviewer has noted, the movie is bad – and the movie is bad because the book was bad. “The film and book need Appalachia to be poor, broken, and dirty, because they depend on us believing that the mountains are somewhere we want Vance to escape. They need to frame poverty as a moral failing of individuals—as opposed to systems—because they have to imply that something about Vance’s character allowed him to get away from his hillbilly roots. Hillbilly Elegy has to simplify the people and problems of Appalachia, because it has decided to tell the same old pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative that so many of us reject.” – The Atlantic

After Nearly 13,000 Authors Protest, Amazon Adjusts Royalty-Snagging Audible Policy

Readers could return an audiobook if they’d bought it less than 365 days earlier, and the royalties from the audiobook would come out of the author’s next paycheck. What the heck? Some authors say it’s more like a library – but without any library royalty payments. Audible has changed the time limit to seven days. – The Guardian (UK)

Theatres Are Saving A Christmas Carol

Did … did it need saving? Well, perhaps the theatres do; it’s been such a large money maker for theatres in the U.S. for, well, many years. Now, as the holiday season kicks into high gear, theatres “are using every contagion-reduction strategy they have honed during the coronavirus pandemic: outdoor stagings, drive-in productions, street theater, streaming video, radio plays and even a do-it-yourself kit sent by mail.” – The New York Times