In Germany, the home of modern board-gaming, the industry has grown by over 40% in the past five years; the four-day SPIEL trade fair this year saw 1,500 new board and card game releases, with 209,000 attendees from around the world. – Fast Company
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Slideshare Has Become A Major Repository For Pirated Books
The more popular the book, the more pervasive the SlideShare piracy. Searches for the top five fiction and nonfiction books on the New York Times bestseller list (which includes authors ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Delia Owens to Ronan Farrow) produce multiple pages of pirated e-book links on SlideShare for each title. – Fast Company
When Piet Mondrian Painted Landscapes
“Decades before becoming New York’s Pied Piper for nonobjective art, he had established a reputation in Europe for navigating and remaking realism in his own image.” – Hyperallergic
New Year’s Manifesto
The New Year seems to be a good time to try to set down some of my basic thoughts about the need for and the path to effective community engagement. As often happens on this blog, this is a very rough first draft. Refinements will follow. – Doug Borwick
Book Print Sales Were Down 1.3 Percent In 2019
The decline was not unexpected, as sales in 2018 were driven by strong performances of a plethora of political books and the blockbuster success of Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which was the top seller that year with more than three million copies sold. In 2019, Becoming was the #1 title in adult nonfiction, selling about 1.2 million copies. – Publishers Weekly
Intimacy Coordinators Are Making Sex Scenes Sexier As Well As Safer
On stages and film/video sets alike, the practitioners of this new profession help actors feel secure physically and emotionally — which, naturally, help the actors do their jobs better. What’s more, the intimacy pros are able to choreograph and describe the movements to be done better than directors can. Writer Lizzie Feidelson reports on how exactly they work. – The New York Times Magazine
Holographic Artists? Yes, And There’s More
Pop-star holograms are exploding out of a chemical reaction between three elements that have been influencing human decision-making for thousands of years: supply, demand, and survival instinct. – Artnet
‘Reality Is The Better Writer’: Why Gabriel García Márquez’s Journalism Is Even More Important Than His Fiction
“In fact, while his novels and stories may have won him global renown, journalism was his first calling. Not only was it foundational to his development as a writer, but it also remained integral to his work and public persona throughout his life, from his early days as a cub reporter in Colombia until his death in Mexico in 2014.” – The Nation
How Are We Deciding Which Movies Are Actually Any Good?
There’s always been a divide between what the critical culture celebrates and what audience members actually want to see. “This three-and-a-half-hour Turkish film about the struggle between a boy and his father is a heartrending exploration of generational divides among a swiftly changing world …” “I don’t know, does anything blow up?” But that divide seems to be growing, with almost no living critic able to wield the kind of power figures like Siskel and Ebert used to have to get butts in seats, even so-called difficult films or subtitled films or art films. – The Guardian
After Losing Parts Of Three Fingers, Pianist Is Back At The Keyboard
“As he lay bleeding on his kitchen floor in Bedford, the snow blower that lopped off the tips of three of his fingers still sputtering outside, the same question kept rattling around in Murray Daniels’s head: Will I ever play piano again?” – The Boston Globe