Category: issues

Mastodon was meant to be a kinder, gentler, no-fascist Twitter. Then a right-wing social network moved to Mastodon. “It’s a hard problem, playing off the deepest limitations of decentralized projects like Mastodon. Mastodon arose from the idealistic open-source software movement, designed to let anybody run their own social media site. But it was never intended to support something like Gab.” – The Verge

“Across Europe, voluntary promoters, programmers and enthusiasts employ UK artists. They don’t get paid, they don’t receive funding and they often lose money from their own pockets to keep the show on the road. They do it because they love it, because they want to share the art they love in the communities where they live – and they love British artists. They create vital grassroots ecosystems that are all but invisible to UK policy-makers, whose narrow view of culture is constrained to the assemblage of creaking institutions to which they are bound.” – Arts Professional

Because it’s often used in a winking way, the term “guilty pleasure” feels innocent, like a joke we’re proving we’re in on. But if that joke is about something that brings us genuine joy and isn’t harming anyone, then what’s the punch line? – The New York Times

The creative class has seen remarkable growth in the past decade, increasing from 44 million members in 2005 to more than 56 million in 2017, as virtually all large U.S. metros saw growth. The rate of creative class growth (27.2 percent) was more than double the growth rate of overall U.S. workforce (13.6 percent) over this period. – CityLab

Advocates of personalized learning say that the approach has been unfairly conflated with teacherless, online-only education. They invoke Dewey and Freire and Montessori as guiding lights and take pains to emphasize, in almost liturgical unison, that personalized learning is not about tech—and that “tech is just a tool.” But skeptics warn that underneath the language of “student-centered” pedagogy is a tech-intensive model that undermines communal values, accelerates privatization, and turns public schools into big-data siphons. – The New Yorker

“These questions are swirling around the future of the Jewish Museum Berlin, one of the city’s most popular visitor attractions, after the abrupt departure last month of its director, Peter Schäfer. He left after a string of controversies in which critics — including the Israeli government and the main organization representing Jews in Germany — said the institution had gone beyond its mission and become overly political.” – The New York Times

“The so-called Liget project, initiated in 2011, aims to transform Budapest’s city park (Városliget) into a cultural hub, including the new National Gallery, Museum of Ethnography and House of Hungarian Music, alongside the existing thermal baths and an expanded city zoo. The project hit a major milestone in May, as the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán opened one of Europe’s largest museum collections centres on the nearby site of a former hospital.” – The Art Newspaper

“In the first public protest by such artists in many years, well-known actors … attended a demonstration of a few hundred people outside the government offices on Victory Square on June 30 … [and] museum employees around the country took part in a one-hour strike on July 3 urging the government to reconsider the cuts.” – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Between 2011 and 2018, the number of jobs in the creative industries increased by 30.6%, compared with 10.1% in the UK overall. – The Stage