“We’re often told, in hand-wringing tones, about the growing differences between red and blue states, and about our increasingly divisive political and social rhetoric. But, in Dos Passos’s view, division has been the rule in American life, not the exception; he considered it to be authentically American. The U.S.A. novels plumbed the depths of our rifts, and explored how they might be widened by a media-saturated age, and by the fragmentation of information and the latent social hysteria that come with it.” – The New Yorker
Blog
Disruption? You Can Measure The Cognitive Dissonance
Connected technologies put pressure on our normative concepts like privacy, autonomy, and manipulation by changing the world so that our old concepts no longer apply and by pushing us to come up with new or revised concepts, creating conceptual confusion. – 3 Quarks Daily
How The Cha-Cha Led A Refugee Couple From Boat People To Oscar Contenders
Chipaul and Mille Cao, who grew up as members of wartime Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority, met at a dance party just six months before the Communist takeover of the entire country; they fled separately and were apart for years. They ultimately reunited in Southern California, married, and took up competitive ballroom dancing — and now a 20-minute film about them, Walk Run Cha Cha, has made the shortlist for the Best Documentary Short Oscar. – Los Angeles Times
Epic Bomb: “Cats” Could Lose $100 Million
Tom Hooper’s big-screen adaptation has clawed its way to $38 million globally after two weeks in theaters, a dismal figure that could result in $100 million in theatrical losses, according to rival studio executives. – Variety
‘Her Invention Is Ceaseless, Her Influence Is Profound’ — Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Pays Tribute To Caryl Churchill
“In the course of a writing life that spans 60 years, she’s changed the dramatic landscape of two centuries, and evolved more than any other British playwright our conceptions of what a play even is. She’s even changed the way we write them down.” – American Theatre
Sarasota To Sarasota Symphony: Don’t Leave
City officials are especially sensitive to the possibility of losing the Sarasota Orchestra after the recent relocation of two other cultural institutions outside of the city. – Sarasota Herald Tribune
Which Nights Sell Best For Dance And Classical Music?
In Pittsburgh, at least, it seems not to be nights at all: it’s weekend matinees, across the genres. Sara Bauknecht and Jeremy Reynolds get into the details. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Asia Gets Its First-Ever LGBTQ-Focused Streaming Service
“GagaOOLala brings more than 1,000 feature films, shorts, web series, and documentaries to people across Asia, where censorship and traditional attitudes mean there has been little in the way of gay content in the mainstream media. After launching in 2017 in Taiwan, a beacon for gay rights since becoming the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, it has expanded to 21 territories including several that still criminalise homosexuality.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
How The 2010s Became The Queerest Decade Ever On Screen
“It feels like we’re leaving this decade light years ahead of where we entered it. In 2010, salacious stories about queer people were still routinely seen in tabloids and on TV. Today, LGBTQ+ people are heralded for being themselves, and our stories are being normalized and told with a broader range of diversity and experiences than ever before.” Writer Jill Gutowitz talks with four leading queer media creators about how it happened. – them
Barbara Testa, Who Discovered One Of American Literature’s Great Missing Links, Dead At 91
“Barbara Testa had enjoyed a perfectly anonymous life in Hollywood until she crawled up in the attic one day and opened a steamer trunk left behind by her grandfather, a 19th-century attorney with powerful friends. Inside … was a handwritten manuscript that would solve a century-old literary riddle and plunge Testa into the headlines in a mounting dispute over ownership of the precious document, the missing first half of the original [manuscript] of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” – Los Angeles Times