“Why on Earth are people still buying a self-help book from 1936? Carnegie’s principles of relentless positivity are right at home in a culture of ingratiation, from the widespread drive to amass online friends by liking their posts (and thence to become an influencer) to the way every interaction with someone in the service industry feels like the prelude to a customer satisfaction survey. His ideas retain a startling currency in a society whose very drives and mores he helped to create.”
Category: AUDIENCE
The Totally Inspiring Story Of How Two Kenyans Started A Library And A Bookstore
The online store, which Arunga described as “Amazon for Africa, with fewer payment options,” has now sold a thousand books in Kenya and beyond—a relative handful, but, to Williams, a meaningful start. In order to support a full-time employee, he said, the store only needs to sell fifty books a day. And if that happens it could serve as a proof of concept for literary entrepreneurship in the developing world.
Eight Broadway Stars And Directors Give Their Thoughts On Trump’s Tweets And Theater As Safe Space
Susan Stroman: “For somebody like me who’s done The Scottsboro Boys, it’s a space to start a conversation.”
Matthew Broderick: “We’re now talking about yet another nonissue. … It’s like [Trump] flashes a little shiny paper in front of everybody and any bit of bad news gets forgotten.”
Andrea Martin: “‘A safe place.’ Not if Patti LuPone’s onstage!”
In 19th-Century America, Theater Was Anything But A Safe Space
To judge from newspaper reports of the time, audience behavior was more like what you get at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Research Reveals Six Story Arcs We All Respond To
They examined 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection — all English-language texts between 20,000 and 100,000 words — using three language processing filters. In the end, they found “broad support for the following six emotional arcs…”
The “Tinder Of Square-dancing” Has Sparked A Dance Craze In China
On most mornings, loud EDM, tinged with strokes of traditional Chinese music, blasts from giant speakers in the nation’s parks. Those parks fill with grandmas and a smattering of grandpas who have forsaken tai chi for “sailor dancing.”
How The Right Is Using Left-Leaning Celebrity Angst Against Itself
“While the angry tweets, therapeutic Instagram testimonials and fiery speeches may comfort their fans, these left-leaning celebrities are also inadvertently energizing the opposition. Conservative news outlets — most notably Breitbart News Network, the right-wing populist enclave — are perfecting the art of sapping Democratic stars’ name recognition and repurposing their words and actions into pro-Trump material.”
So What Exactly *Is* ‘Longform Journalism’? It’s Not Just A Word Count
Brendan Fitzgerald considers, and questions, the taxonomy: “such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. … Whether labels like ‘longform’ reward a story is another matter.”
Universal Translator? An Expert Weighs In On The Challenges
“I am a professional translator, having translated some 125 books from the French. One might therefore expect me to bristle at Google’s claim that its new translation engine is almost as good as a human translator, scoring 5.0 on a scale of 0 to 6, whereas humans average 5.1. But I’m also a PhD in mathematics who has developed software that ‘reads’ European newspapers in four languages and categorises the results by topic. So, rather than be defensive about the possibility of being replaced by a machine translator, I am aware of the remarkable feats of which machines are capable, and full of admiration for the technical complexity and virtuosity of Google’s work. My admiration does not blind me to the shortcomings of machine translation, however.”
‘Fantastic Riches And Where To Find Them’ – How To Keep J.K. Rowling’s Astoundingly Successful Enterprise Growing
“A film franchise is like a shark: it must keep moving forward or die. Now that the goldmine of Harry Potter has been largely exhausted after eight phenomenally successful films, the baton has been picked up …”