The Academy’s perceived snubs—of actors such as Us’s Lupita Nyong’o and Hustlers’ Jennifer Lopez, along with directors such as Little Women’s Greta Gerwig and The Farewell’s Lulu Wang—are as unfortunate as they are predictable. And comments like Stephen King’s reveal a major reason why: Diversity is too often discussed as something separate from, or even in conflict with, artistic virtue. – The Atlantic
Blog
Not just subconscious, but DNA deep
When we talk about organizations, or other forms of collective action by groups of people, we often speak as if we have dominantly conscious control. But evidence from a range of disciplines suggests that we’re not really in conscious control of much — individually or collectively. – Andrew Taylor
A dip into Mexico City street music and avant-garde
The metropolis does not have a high profile in generally accepted narrative of jazz and other progressive music, although it should: Mexico City has a thriving community of skilled, sophisticated and risk-taking musicians, having produced and attracted modernists and innovators in all the arts since at least the 1920s. – Howard Mandel
Is Amazon About To Take Over The Bestseller Book Business?
The conventional wisdom that now governs book publishing—that things are, for the first time in a long time, not that bad—is wrong. At the very least, it overlooks the fact that Amazon has spent the last decade accumulating yet more power and leverage, and that its ambitions have since moved past simply being the world’s largest bookstore. On Tuesday evening, The Wall Street Journal surveyed one of the most important recent developments in the industry: Amazon is finally publishing work by some of America’s biggest authors. – The New Republic
Canada’s “Prairie Castles” Are Disappearing
Grain elevators were once an icon of Canada’s west: often painted a bright boxcar red, they stood in towns across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. As the tallest structures in the vast landscapes, they were visible from kilometers away and were known as “prairie castles” or “prairie cathedrals”. – The Guardian
How Ubiquitous Public Surveillance Is Changing Our Understanding Of Human Behavior
“My colleagues want to better understand how people behave in the wild and how we can capture every-day behavior without asking people to self report … [because] that’s a very unreliable way of collecting data. What I’m seeing is just a very new landscape and regulations that are not ready.” – Vice
Reconsidering Alan Bloom’s “Closed Minds”
Re-reading Bloom, I am thunderstruck, because my inclination is to blame it all on social media and attendant technologies favoring vicarious experience. But Bloom’s 1987 narrative establishes an earlier start. He distinguishes my sixties’ generation from his eighties’ students, in whom tendencies that we initiated yielded a dead end. It may in effect be read as a tale of unwanted, unanticipated consequences. – The American Interest
National Archives Blurs Anti-Trump Protest Signs Of 2017 Women’s March In Exhibition
By blurring out details from protest signs in an image of the 2017 Women’s March, including the name of President Trump and references to the female anatomy — a decision the Archives publicly apologized for on Saturday — it has damaged the faith many Americans, particularly women, may have had in its role as an impartial conservator of the nation’s records. – Washington Post
A Group Of Musicians Relocate To A Failing Town To Create A New Culture. Townspeople Resist
The group wanted to Klein Jasedow provides a nearly perfect test case for a theory, popular within the classical music industry, which postulates that if we could just tweak the atmosphere in which the work is presented, we could unleash its universal potential. – Van
Jazz Saxophonist Jimmy Heath, 93
Mr. Heath’s saxophone sound was spare but playful, with a beaming tone that exuded both joy and command. But his reputation rested equally on his abilities as a composer and arranger for large ensembles, interpolating bebop’s crosshatched rhythms and extended improvisations into fulsome tapestries. – The New York Times