Joshua Helmer, 31, had been an assistant director at the PMA and was viewed as a rising star in the art world when, in early 2018, he “was separated” from the museum. Several female staffers say that he both asked them out (some said yes) and belittled their abilities, and two months ago he was actually barred from the PMA building. Just a few months after leaving Philadelphia, though, he was named director of the Erie Art Museum at the other end of the state — and he’s already been accused of trying to date an intern there. – The New York Times
Blog
One Day After Judge Banned Gay Jesus Satire, Brazil’s Chief Justice OKs It
In overruling the lower court’s injunction barring Netflix from continuing to stream The First Temptation of Christ, Supreme Federal Court President José Antonio Dias Toffoli said, “One cannot suppose that a humorous satire has the ability to weaken the values of the Christian faith, whose existence is traced back more than two thousand years.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
Closed Caption Glasses Extend The Audience Experience
The glasses are aimed at D/deaf audiences and offer personal captioning, flashing the production’s dialogue in front of the wearer’s eyes as the actors say it. They were developed by the NT and introduced in 2018, but will now be used at the London Short Film Festival for screenings of works by emerging directors, including Maxine Peake and Lena Headey. They will be used across four screens at the BFI Southbank. – The Stage
How Relaxed Performances Are Changing… Performance
Relaxed performance — an approach to performance that challenges what have developed as strict expectations and codes for audience and performer engagement and behaviour — is making theatre and other types of live performance like fashion shows and musical events more accessible. – The Conversation
Is The Book-To-Movie Trend Hurting Storytelling?
We are now in the mature stage of a book-to-film boom that is quietly transforming how Americans read and tell stories—and not for the better. The power of this force is hard to quantify because intellectual property is now being bought in Hollywood in such unprecedented volume and diversity of source material. Almost all written works that achieve prominence today (and many more that don’t) will be optioned, and increasingly it is becoming rare for film and television projects to move forward without intellectual property attached. – The Baffler
Adversarial Argument Might Not Serve Philosophical Debate
The lack of progress in adversarial philosophical exchange might rest on a simple but problematic division of labour: in professional settings such as talks, seminars and papers, we standardly criticise others’, rather than our own, views. At the same time, we clearly risk our reputation much more when proposing an idea rather than criticising it. This systematically disadvantages proponents of (new) ideas. – Aeon
San Francisco Ballet’s Longest-Serving Prima Begins Her 25th Season
Yuan Yuan Tan wasn’t even intending to join the company back in 1995, but no principal dancer in the history of the company has lasted as long. – San Francisco Chronicle
Why We’re Fascinated By How-To Videos
What are people looking to do? The most popular searches, by one analysis, range from the achingly prosaic to the exceedingly specific—from “how to kiss” to “how to make a rainbow-loom starburst bracelet.” You can learn how to boil water, field strip an AR-15 rifle, or fly a 747. But stories abound of people—usually kids—achieving impressive proficiency in everything from opera singing to dubstep dancing by simply copying what they have seen in YouTube videos. YouTube pedagogy has swept through—and virtually helped create—fields like competitive cubing (Rubik’s), where solve times have plummeted, aided largely by the transmission of techniques via YouTube. – Nautilus
Pakistani Authorities Paid No Mind To This Satirical Novel When It Was In English. Now That It’s In Urdu, They’re Confiscating It
“First published, in English, in 2008, [Mohammed Hanif’s] A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a dark satire about the possible reasons for the death of [dictator] General Zia [ul-Haq] in a plane crash in 1988. Featuring bumbling generals and homosexual romance, it was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, longlisted for the Booker and won the Commonwealth prize for best first novel.” The Urdu translation of the novel has just been released, and men claiming to be from the Pakistani military spy agency ISI raided the Karachi offices of the book’s publisher, seized all the copies, and demanded a list of booksellers who had ordered it. – The Guardian
Franco Ambrosetti In Splendid Company
For his album Long Waves, the Italian trumpeter and flugelhornist assembles a group of contemporaries to play his compositions and a couple of cherished standard songs. Ambrosetti’s fluid improvisations, sometimes with a Miles Davis bent, are consistently impressive. – Doug Ramsey