Blog

Nope – Reading Won’t Make You Better! (But That’s Not Why To Do It)

These studies miss a bigger point by implying that reading fiction is, at its best, a tidy cause-and-effect process. Enter intellectually weak and benighted, exit emotionally toned and trim, as if a novel were the psychological equivalent of kettlebells or a Peloton bike. Fiction’s strength, though, is that it delivers not order and clear direction, but mess and evocations of our unsteady state of being. – Washington Post

Peaked: Record 532 Scripted TV Shows This Season. Too Many?

There were 532 scripted drama and comedy series in 2019 on broadcast, cable and streaming platforms, a 7 percent increase over 2018, John Landgraf told a TV critics meeting Thursday. When FX started its tracking in 2009 there were about 200 shows, with streaming services responsible for the lion’s share of the subsequent growth. – Washington Post

Which Version Of Equal Are We Talking About?

One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved. Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations. Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly. – The New Yorker

Experts: Don’t Blame Digital Effects For “Cats” Bomb

While the digital technology that helped create realistic fur in both films is “advancing all the time,” it can’t rescue a flawed approach to a project. “The techniques [you use] can’t do it. All movies are fake. There’s nothing real in them, and the illusion of that world that you’re building is created by the sum total of everything – not just one item in that.” – Variety

Darren Walker Joins National Gallery Board

Walker has emerged as one of the country’s preeminent voices for the arts, and social justice, and for new strategies to ameliorate inequality. He has delivered the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture sponsored by Americans for the Arts and was the subject of a glossy profile in the New York Times titled “The Man With the $13 Billion Checkbook.” And in September, the National Gallery of Art announced that Walker would be joining its board, one of the smallest and most exclusive governing bodies in the art world, with only nine members, four of them ex officio positions, including the chief justice of the United States and the secretaries of the Treasury and State departments. – Washington Post

Bicultural Comedy In 2020 America: How One Chicano Playwright Creates It

Herbert Sigüenza, a founding member of the Chicano sketch company Culture Clash and playwright-in-residence at San Diego Rep (which premiered his latest script, Bad Hombres/Good Wives) talks to dramaturg Matthew McMahan about “the unique dynamics of bicultural comedy. He frames the comic writer as a type of diplomat whose plays yoke together divergent ideas, jokes, characters, and languages, while managing to get a diverse group of people to laugh at it all the same.” – HowlRound

How “The Irishman” De-Aged Its Stars With Artificial Intelligence

When it came to de-aging De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino for The Irishman, the $140 million Netflix production opted for a specific kind of fountain of youth, created from artificial-intelligence software, first-of-its-kind motion-capture technology, and an experimental three-camera rigging system that rendered the Oscar-winning trio of septuagenarian actors as eerily smooth-skinned incarnations of their younger selves. – New York Magazine