As the year and decade end, “it will shut its doors for the last time, becoming a glass-and-steel white elephant – and an almost-too-obvious metaphor for the crisis facing America’s newspaper industry.” – The Guardian
Blog
Remains Of Ancient Mayan Palace Discovered In Yucatán
“At the archaeological site of Kulubá, nestled amid the lowland forests of Mexico’s Yucatán state, experts have unearthed the remains of a large palace” — six rooms, 180 feet long, 50 feet wide, 20 feet high — “believed to have been used by Maya elite around 1,000 years ago.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Alasdair Gray, Godfather Of Scotland’s Late-20th-Century Literary Renaissance, Dead At 85
“Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, AL Kennedy and Janice Galloway, among others, were all Gray’s bairns. Authors invited Gray to illustrate their books. Little magazines sported his self-portraits and cursive designs on their covers. A graphic artist known locally for his eccentric appearance and behaviour became, at the age of nearly 50, a central figure of the literary world.” – The Guardian
Even With Mega-Franchise Movies In 2019, Box Office Declined. Now What?
“The slide in revenues is still disappointing because it occurred at a time when Walt Disney Studios put nearly all of its major franchises on the field — a show of firepower that enabled the company to pulverize records, racking up more than $11 billion at the global box office. With an arsenal that includes Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and — thanks to its $71 billion acquisition of much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — 20th Century Fox, Disney was able to control roughly 40% of the domestic marketplace.” – Variety
Always-On Culture Has Warped Our Sense of Time And Progress
“The reason that it feels like nothing happened in the 2010s is that too much happened. Each cultural landmark got instantly effaced by the onrush of the next, and the next. This memory-erosion effect is one reason why it feels like something’s gone awry with our sense of time. While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call “culture-time” feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering.” – The Guardian
Why Do Other Art Forms – Books, Movies, TV – Make Fun Of Theatre?
As if theater weren’t already mocked enough for its hysteria and jazz hands, it now seems to be pop culture’s punching bag. – The New York Times
Jimmy Iovine: The Music Business’s Looming Problem
“Margin. It doesn’t scale. At Netflix, the more subscribers you have, the less your costs are. In streaming music, the costs follow you. And the streaming music services are utilities — they’re all the same. Look at what’s working in video. Disney has nothing but original stuff. Netflix has tons of original stuff. But the music streaming services are all the same, and that’s a problem.” – The New York Times
How The On-Demand Economy Is Changing Our Experience of Cities
“The 2010s were the decade the city became an App Store: an online marketplace where our choices were closely tracked, where that data became part of the products we were using, and where digital clusters of activity displaced real-world transactions. Yes, we still go downtown for drinks, meals, and shopping experiences. But, more and more, we live in cities of the cloud.” – CityLab
What A Crossword Created By A Computational Linguistics Researcher Looks Like
“There’s a similar mixture that goes into being a computational linguistics researcher,” with lots of coding, math and empirical work. It certainly helps to have a love of language and be interested in the quirks of language.” – Washington Post
A Finger Picker Salutes Herbie Nichols
Spinning Song: Duck Baker Plays The Music Of Herbie Nichols
In the New York jazz scene of the 1950s and early sixties, the breadth and depth of his talent won enormous respect for pianist and composer Herbie Nichols. One of those affected by Nichols is Duck Baker, a fingerstyle guitarist from Richmond. – Doug Ramsey