Why Read Horror When The World Is So Horrifying On Its Own?

The world is horrible, but horror books and horror movies give us examples of people who fight back against the horror, and sometimes win: “The banal evils of the world — children shot, neighbors exiled, selves reframed in an instant as inhuman threats — these are horrible, but they aren’t horror. Horror promises that the plot arc will fall after it rises. Horror spins everyday evil to show its fantastical face, literalizing its corroded heart into something more dramatic, something easier to imagine facing down. Horror helps us name the original sins out of which horrible things are born.”

What Does It Mean To Be Innovative In America’s Nonprofit Theatre?

The study’s authors found that the average arts and culture organization in the U.S. engaged with 13.4 percent of its local population, either in person or online, in 2013. At the same time, the authors noted that their metric of “total touch points” does not reveal the duration, depth or quality of engagement each person has with the organization.

No More Free Sundays At Colosseum, Uffizi, Etc., Says Italy’s New Government

“The new culture minister of Italy’s populist coalition government, Alberto Bonisoli, has [announced] that a monthly free-entry initiative at the country’s museums and monuments is coming to an end. Since July 2014, more than 480 state-run cultural sites, including Pompeii, the Uffizi and the Colosseum, have been free to visit on the first Sunday of every month. Known as Domenica al museo (Sunday at the museum), the policy was one of many culture reforms introduced by Bonisoli’s centre-left predecessor, Dario Franceschini.”

Should Museums Be Trying To Get Visitors To Slow Down?

That a lot of visitors make a beeline through art museum galleries has long been a bugaboo for curators and directors—“studies of museum visitors have shown that people look at artworks very quickly, spending maybe five seconds or less per painting,” Brent Benjamin, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum told Observer. But despite this desire on the part of arts professionals, slowing visitors down in front of individual objects has not been the primary goal at most institutions of late—though they certainly want to get people in, and get them to stay.

BookTubers: The YouTube Figures Who Get Thousands Of Followers For Videos About Books

Christine Riccio, the most popular of the bunch: “I was reading a lot of books, and I had no one to discuss them with. I was like, ‘I’ll be lucky if I ever get 500 subscribers over here.'” She now has more than 400,000. Reporter Concepción de León meets Riccio and several of her fellows at VidCon (yes, it’s sort of like ComicCon, but for videomakers).

AMC Movie Theatres Reports A Great Spring/Summer Quarter At Box Office

Revenues from admissions jumped 17.7% to $896.3M during a period that saw the release of such blockbusters as Avengers: Infinity War, Incredibles 2 and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Food and beverage sales increased 19.2% to $445.8M. Of the total revenue pie, $313.2M came from international theaters as compared to $294.9M for the three months ended June 30, 2017.

Theatre Company Decides To Cut Shows, Open Adult Trade School On Converted Bus Instead

“Award-winning Slung Low theatre company is known for staging epic outdoor theatre productions around the UK. Now it’s decided to cut back on the number of shows it makes and set up a ‘community college’ teaching astronomy, cooking and decorative blacksmithing. Artistic director Alan Lane said it was ‘the most useful and most interesting’ thing they could do with their subsidy.”

Publishing Revolution? More Brainy Books Are Finding Sales Success

We are turning away from glitzy but disposable stories of fame and excess and towards more serious, thoughtful, quiet books that help us understand our place in the world. Analysts at the Bookseller parsed data from Nielsen BookScan, and saw over the past five years a dramatic rise in the sales of “long-tail” nonfiction titles, often works on politics, economics, history or medicine that attempted to synthesise or challenge received thinking on the subject.

Why MoviePass Was Utterly Doomed

Felix Salmon: “The easy answer is: It was selling dollars for a dime, and you can’t do that for very long until you go bust. … The company burned cash until it didn’t have any cash left to burn and fizzled out. But in the spirit of Chesterton’s fence, it’s worth looking at the thesis behind MoviePass, and to try to make a distinction between the calculated risks that just didn’t pan out, on the one hand, and the crazy ideas that were never going to work, on the other.”