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The Social Justice Wars Come To The Quilting Community

“A usually cheery online community of quilters has been ripped apart by a sewing challenge depicting a No. 2 pencil erasing the ‘in’ from the word injustice. Some members of the National Quilt Museum’s Block of the Month Club, which gives out quilting patterns from an array of artists, objected to the January block, claiming it introduced politics into the 13,400-person group. The design was created by the Social Justice Sewing Academy, a California nonprofit loosely tied to Black Lives Matter.” – The Washington Post

Special Multi-Company Auditions Offer Too-Rare Opportunity For Nonwhite Ballet Dancers

The sessions, attended by leaders from New York City Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and Charlotte Ballet, were held in conjunction with this past weekend’s conference of the International Association of Blacks in Dance. Reporter Ellen Dunkel sat in. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Van Gogh’s Weirdest Self-Portrait, Long Considered By Some A Forgery, Is Genuine

Doubts about the authenticity of the painting, which depicts the artist giving some serious side-eye, first arose in 1970. But research conducted jointly by the National Gallery of Norway (which owns the work) and the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has determined that the portrait is no forgery — and that it’s the only one van Gogh ever painted while hospitalized for psychosis. – Yahoo! (AFP)

Brazil’s Culture Secretary Fired After Quoting Goebbels In Video Speech

“A few minutes into the speech, secretary of culture Roberto Alvim said, ‘The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and it will be national, it’ll be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement and deeply committed to the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing.’ The line is a slightly modified version of a Goebbels quote … [and] the video also featured music from Lohengrin, Adolf Hitler’s favorite Wagner opera.” The subsequent outcry was huge, and Alvin was ousted within 24 hours. – artnet

Computer Can Tell It’s You By The Way You Dance

Studying how people move to music is a powerful tool for researchers looking to understand how and why music affects us the way it does. Over the last few years, researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have used motion capture technology—the same kind used in Hollywood—to learn that your dance moves say a lot about you, such as how extroverted or neurotic you are, what mood you happen to be in, and even how much you empathize with other people. – Phys.org

Tony Hall To Step Down From Running The BBC At Critical Moment

The announcement comes as the publicly funded BBC is facing intense political and public pressure amid a fast-changing media landscape and viewing habits. It has been criticized by both sides of the Brexit debate over its coverage of the U.K.’s impending departure from the European Union, and some in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government have suggested changing the BBC’s funding model. – Washington Post (AP)

Alan Turing And The Shaping Of Artificial Intelligence

Had Turing lived longer, perhaps the state of artificial intelligence would encompass more than drearily corporate banalities such as the Amazon checkout window making suggestions about what you might like for your next purchase, Google offering up a few words for how to complete a sentence in progress, or a South Korean genius having his soul crushed by a roomful of statistics wonks—not to mention more chillingly Orwellian developments, such as facial-recognition software. – The New Yorker