The company’s leaders say they want to map a different route to success in Silicon Valley, one that’s less meteoric and more humane. But in its first year as a public company, it faces a pivotal challenge: How to grow beyond a user base that has historically skewed toward white, suburban women without alienating loyalists, stereotyping newcomers, or potentially allowing for the spread of misinformation and radicalization. – Medium
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Trying To Cope With Crowds, Louvre Creates The VR Mona Lisa Experience
The virtual reality tour will be a more intimate encounter. The VR tour, designed to remedy the problem of crowds and distance, will be housed in a small gallery room near the main Leonardo exhibition and apart from the “Mona Lisa.” – The New York Times
The LA Architects Taking The Cultural Buildings World By Storm
“Previous generations had a signature style, and it’s easier to label,” says Mark Lee, seated before a wall of printed renderings in his firm’s cluttered West L.A. studio. “Our generation wants to escape that.” – Los Angeles Times
Morphing ‘Swan Lake’ Into A Modern Irish Folk Tale
Choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan has taken the kernel of the Tchaikovsky/Petipa classic’s story and transplanted to in the milieu of contemporary Ireland to create Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, with a score of Irish and Nordic folk music accompanying a narrative of a depressed loner and a young woman molested by a priest and changed into a swan so she can’t tell anyone of his crime. – The New York Times
Band-Aids And Sticking Plasters: UK Government Promise Of More Culture Investment In Perspective
With local authority funding for culture now more than £236m lower than in 2010, and museums alone having lost £109m in annual funding over the past decade, the Government’s promise of £250m for culture over the next five years will at best put a sticking plaster on a patient with a life-threatening injury. – Arts Professional
The Rehabilitation Of Marie Antoinette
“This week, 226 years since her execution on Oct. 16, 1793, a new exhibition in Paris aims to show how the queen’s image has been transformed in recent years. From reviled royal to pop icon, her face now appears on gift shop souvenirs at her former home at Versailles, on bars of chocolate, hairbrushes, mugs, shopping bags, fridge magnets and snow globes.” – Los Angeles Times
The Complicated, Contradictory Genius Of Thomas Edison
“He built the world’s first film studio, yet had little interest in movies as entertainment. He was a showboating maestro of public relations, but he often turned down invitations and celebrations that would force him to leave his laboratory. He was a workaholic whose final résumé boasted 1,093 patents and countless inventions—including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the alkaline battery, the X-ray fluoroscope, and the carbon-button microphone. Yet his most important idea wasn’t something anybody could patent or touch.” – The Atlantic
Shape-Shifting Screens: How Filmmakers Are Playing With Aspect Ratios
The proportions of movies’ height and width have changed several times over the course of cinema history, but, for practical reasons (projectionists don’t like changing equipment all the time), at any given time the ratios have been standardized. Until the rise of digital projection, that is. Now it’s fairly easy for filmmakers to play with aspect ratios, and that’s what they’re doing. Ben Kenigsberg looks at four examples from this fall’s releases. – The New York Times
Instagram Removes “Likes” – We Need Another Way To Value Content
The removal of visible likes is by no means a threat to the influencer marketing world, but rather an opportunity to shift how we see success in the digital age. – Fast Company
There’s Doublethink At The Heart Of Arts Awards, And This Year’s Double Booker Prize Brought It To The Surface
“Everyone agrees that competition is the enemy of art. And yet, on the whole, there is also an agreement to conspire in the notion that it isn’t. This paradox, this doublethink, usually works fine, since it opens up the space in which the extra-artistic functions of prizes can be fulfilled.” Charlotte Higgins analyzes how this doublethink works — and how the decision of this year’s Booker jury to flout the prize’s rules messed it up. – The Guardian