“The Goethe-Institut has partnered with the Los Angeles Poverty Department in organizing Worlds of Homelessness, a weeklong interdisciplinary series of events featuring artists, architects, advocates, and performers.” – Hyperallergic
Blog
Why Such A Glut Of Movies About Christmas?
It’s probably no surprise that Hallmark channels have increased their annual Christmas movie count by 20 percent since 2017, but Lifetime has more than quadrupled its output in the last two years and Netflix has doubled its in that same time. – The New York Times
Sean Spicer Is A Dancing Trainwreck. So Why Does He Keep Surviving “Dancing With The Stars?”
Gia Kourlas: “He had a different partner this week because his regular one, Lindsay Arnold, had a death in her family. It didn’t make his dancing better or worse. It remains consistent in its awfulness.” – The New York Times
New Pompidou Centre Opens In Shanghai
Situated along the banks of the Huangpu River on Shanghai’s version of Museum Mile, the new outpost is a collaboration with the West Bund Group, a Chinese state-owned development corporation that together with the local government has reportedly invested more than $3 billion in recent years to transform a former industrial neighborhood into a 7-mile waterfront cultural corridor. – The New York Times
Gary Wills: On Understanding The Patriarchy
“Alter the status of women and you have affected all the most intimate and significant nodes of life: the relation of wife to husband, mother to child, sister to sibling, daughter to parents, worker to coworkers, and employee to employer (or vice versa). This change in women’s standing that happened what seems like yesterday, and is still happening today at an accelerated rate, is the most profound revolution that can take place in a society.” – New York Review of Books
Why Contemporary Architecture Cognoscenti Like “Ugly” Buildings
“A widespread public bewilderment at the ‘Deconstructivist’ showcase buildings that they are told is great modern architecture is well known. But less well understood is that most of the Western world’s architectural academy are militantly disdainful of most popular conceptions of architectural comeliness. And this disdain extends not only to the “classical” in public and commercial buildings but equally to the average person’s ideal of a home and neighborhood.” – The American Conservative
Study: More Innovation In Denser Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods with higher street density not only have more patented innovations, but more citations of the patents they generate. This suggests that neighborhoods with denser streets help facilitate greater knowledge exchange and higher levels of interaction over the ideas they generate. – CityLab
We’re In A Golden Age Of Invented Languages, And We’re Learning A Lot From Them
“Conlangs” (constructed languages) are hardly new: Esperanto and Volapük were created in the 19th century; Tolkien claimed he wrote his Middle Earth books so that someone would speak the Elvish tongues he invented; Klingon was completed in the 1980s. But over the past 30 years, conlangs have exploded (aided greatly by the Internet connecting the nerds who do the constructing). Some of these languages are being used in neurolinguistic research, and one has been developed as a useful lingua franca for Slavs. – Slate
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (16)
The first Wal-Mart outside Arkansas opened in 1968 in Smalltown, U.S.A. Its record section had three bins of classical albums, many of them from Victrola, RCA’s budget line, which featured reissues from the golden age of 78s. For me that meant, first and foremost, the man B.H. Haggin called the greatest of all orchestral conductors. – Terry Teachout
Writing Versus The Performance Of Being A Writer
No doubt social media in particular seems to represent the triumph of the writerly type over the writing itself. But DeWitt, Baker, Whitehead, and Atwood are among our most accomplished writers; so what if they’re willing to play the type on occasion? It might seem possible to just perform the office of writer—thoughtfully curated Instagrams of to-read piles, tweets geo-tagged at the MacDowell Colony—but it’s still a publish-or-perish business. – The New Republic