UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary shows how, when confronted with people across the globe who perceived their own lives “in ways radically antagonistic to the requirements of capitalist production,” UNESCO’s cultural programming was developed to “acknowledge, integrate, manage, and assuage” that antagonism. – Los Angeles Review of Books
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What Defined 2019? Ideas? People? How About Stuff?
“Look at the stuff. The Things. Objects. The products that overflow our commercial marketplace, designed for our consumption, that we loved, loathed, mocked, coveted, worried about, or just found so baffling we couldn’t stop obsessing about them.” – Medium
A Decade Ago E-Books Were Going To Take Over Publishing. They Didn’t
Instead, at the other end of the decade, ebook sales seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent. – Vox
Our Fears Of A World Shaped By Algorithms
Within the monoculture obsession, there are two concerns. The first is that in the digital streaming era we have lost a perceived ability to connect over media products as reference points that everyone knows… The second concern is that, because of the pressures of social media and the self-reinforcing biases of recommendation algorithms that drive streaming, culture is becoming more similar than different. – Vox
Modernist Architecture Is Uncomfortable, Doesn’t Wear Well, And Depresses People. So Why Did It Catch On?
“The single undoubted success of the modernist movement was to spread through clever propaganda: first by co-opting the term “modern,” then by covering up a long string of practical failures. Buildings in the modernist canon weather poorly, and post-occupancy evaluations are largely negative.4 To promote such viscerally unattractive architecture, modernism’s supporters had to deprecate the neurological and physiological responses of its users.” – Inference Review
How Opera Is Dealing With #MeToo
“Within the past year, most opera companies have started holding regular sexual harassment workshops, and many distribute and read aloud their sexual harassment policy to incoming casts before the start of rehearsals and distribute contact information for reporting incidents.” – The New York Times (AP)
Best TV Of The Decade? Try Best Types Of TV
“I know readers only have time anymore to read lists, but bear with me. Here are the best kinds of shows we watched over the past 10 years. Many of them belong to more than one category — a sign of their greatness.” – Washington Post
The End Of A Decade-Long Music Project That Was Originally Meant To Be A One-Off
The Green Mountain Project, which has been devoted to producing end-of-year concerts of Monteverdi’s 1610 “Vesper of the Blessed Virgin since 2010, is coming to an end this year in New York – and then heading to Venice. Jolle Greenleaf: “Ending this project needed to be done in a way that really honored everything that everybody did over the years. It feels like the crowning glory — we are going to do it where Monteverdi flourished and was buried. But it’s a little crazy. There’s so many pieces to the organization. There are no cars; there are so many rules. Getting a chamber organ meant renting it from pretty far away and then putting it on a boat.” – The New York Times
What Happened When A Dancer Witnessed Abuse At His Dance Company And Reported It
He was fired, and, to his knowledge, nothing was done to protect the kids from the abuse he saw. The dance company didn’t have an HR team, for one thing. All of this brings up many questions that dancers need to consider: “What protocols are in place to protect dancers at companies that are too small to have a human resources department. Even beyond issues of abuse, how should dancers voice concerns about more routine dysfunction, like late paychecks or unsafe working conditions?” – Dance Magazine
Smartphones Changed The Way We Document Our Lives
And that’s a good thing, not something we should be worried about. Having a camera in your pocket all of the time is “an opportunity to capture your own life more honestly—a way to remember what you were really like in one season of life, the mundane food photos alongside shots of scenic vacations or birthday parties. The mundane things you use your phone to document are the details that add up to a full life, what it was like to be alive right then.” – Slate