Provincial cuts to the Ontario Arts Council will leave small magazines struggling to pay writers and illustrators, silencing important minority and marginalized voices, and putting the magazines’ survival in jeopardy, New Democrat MPP Jill Andrew says. – Toronto Star
Blog
Why Public Libraries Across America Are Eliminating Book Fines
The decision to remove fines is a growing nationwide movement. Already, dozens of U.S. libraries have fully or partially eliminated overdue fines (usually for teens and children), according to a “fine-free” map from the Urban Libraries Council (ULC). – CityLab
The Scary Apocalyptic Literature Of The Nationalist Far Right
Lone wolves, domestic terrorists, white supremacists, and militiamen on the far-right fringes who have long trafficked in an expansive body of published manifestos and propagandist fiction. Theirs is a kind of sick pop culture, constantly updated and running parallel to the mainstream, that fully accounts for apocalyptic race wars and nationalist-driven coups d’etat. Those steeped in this body of literature are primed to expect the moment where their rhetorical “shit” hits the real-life “fan.” – The New Republic
I Used To Be An Avid Reader. But Since The Internet…
“Reading books is something I was once did compulsively, willingly and joyfully. But as I get older and spend more of my life online, reading books has become harder. Studies suggest I’m not alone – research in both Australia and the US suggests reading novels for leisure has declined.” – The Guardian
Silence’s Central Role In Music
As social beings, we are hard-wired to interpret breaks in the flow of human communication. We recognize the pregnant pause, the stunned silence, the expectant hush. A one-beat delay on an answer can reveal hesitation or hurt, or play us for laughs. A closer listen shows musical silence to be just as eloquent. – The New York Times
New Technology Could Finally Make Ancient Pompeii Scrolls Readable
The two unopened scrolls that will be probed belong to the Institut de France in Paris and are part of an astonishing collection of about 1,800 scrolls that was first discovered in 1752 during excavations of Herculaneum. Together they make up the only known intact library from antiquity, with the majority of the collection now preserved in a museum in Naples. – The Guardian
The Grimms’ Fairy Tales Weren’t Published For Children, And The Originals Would Shock Many Parents Today
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm assembled their book of stories as folklorists, not children’s authors, and they intended their book for adult students of German culture, not for parents to read to the kiddies at bedtime. And the stories themselves could be violent: for example, “Cinderella” ends with white birds pecking out the stepsisters’ eyes. – National Geographic History
Donor Myopia
With virtually no public money flowing in, U.S. arts organizations have, understandably, been most concerned with the interests of those who fund the enterprise. This narrowness of attention, this “donor myopia” has created a system in which the broader population can be very nearly unseen. – Doug Borwick
Balking at Walker: Darren, Ford Foundation’s President, Becomes National Gallery’s New Trustee
The news that Darren Walker has been named as one of the National Gallery of Art’s five general trustees gave me pause. My misgivings arose from what struck me as his astonishingly clueless views on the current state of American museums. – Lee Rosenbaum
Ancient Romans Used Infographics
A new book by classicist and historian Andrew M. Riggsby investigates the types of information technologies (IT) drawn, painted, and inscribed on the surfaces of the ancient Roman world and explores how they shaped the daily life of Romans. As Riggsby demonstrates, effective graphic design has been a tricky but important ability for thousands of years. – Hyperallergic