People seem to devour articles, books, and documentaries about the likes of the Fyre Festival and Theranos; Bernie Madoff and Enron are household names. “Reminding ourselves that sometimes liars do get caught and sometimes thieves are punished makes it easier to believe it could happen again. What we like about stories about scammers, I think, is born of the place where envy meets outrage: It’s incredibly unfair, and definitely evil, but also, why didn’t I think of that?” – The Cut
Category: issues
Last Critic Standing – Anyone Left In Boston?
“Now that I’ve expanded beyond the business of writing about people with tattoos and tinnitus in a daily paper, I look around and see there’s almost nothing left of that business. Dwindling print and emerging web magazines cover the music scene comprehensively. Thanks to Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Boston’s own Vanyaland, we’ll always know what Springsteen and Amanda Palmer are up to–and we’ll get smart, forceful opinions on their albums and performances. But music coverage at papers might be dead long before print journalism. Okay, not “long before”: Print seems to be on borrowed time.” – Fast Company
L.A.’s Chicanx Lowrider Culture Caught On In Japan. Is That Cultural Appropriation?
New York Times reporter Walter Thompson-Hernández, a native of Southeast L.A.: “I heard a rumor that lowrider culture — a community with an affinity for cars, outfit with intricate designs, multicolored lights and heavily tinted windows that can be traced in Southern California to as far back as the 1940s — had traveled to Japan. … I knew I had to see it for myself, so I packed my bags for Nagoya, Osaka and Tokyo.” (video) – The New York Times
Energy Company Gives “Transformational” $10 Million Gift To Banff Centre For Indigenous Leadership
The money, doled out over five years, will go toward Indigenous leadership programs and social impact and social innovation courses. It will help pay for faculty, program design and scholarships for those from “remote and under-served communities.” – CBC
This Museum Handles One Of The World’s Touchiest Subjects
“How do you memorialize a holocaust that even now, seven decades after it took place, may still not be entirely safe to talk about?” India’s Partition Museum, which opened in 2017 in Amritsar, in Punjab state and hard by the border with Pakistan, uses documents, photographs, and eyewitness testimony — carefully — to do the very tricky job. – The New York Times
Reading In The 1940s: Let’s Not Idealize it – But There Are Some Fascinating Lessons About Culture
George Hutchinson’s first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives. Educated readers, meanwhile, grew impatient with both the collectivist ethos and the formalist aesthetics that had governed intellectual life a few years earlier. Later, after the 1940s ended, literature lost its importance in general culture—it no longer mattered—partly because, as Hutchinson writes, “other media drew leisure-time attention,” but also because it “became increasingly (but not exclusively) a professional specialization supported by universities.” – New York Review of Books
Climate Gentrification Is Already Happening
Welcome to the age of “climate gentrification,” when the effects of climate change cause residents in one area to relocate to another area that is not experiencing those problems, which drives up property prices. – The Daily Beast
A Worrisome Disconnect Between The Arts And The Public
“If, as many people think, the type of culture you enjoy is one marker of class, then by definition the arts can never be ‘working class’ because class and culture define each other. By this argument, if the working or lower classes (cringeworthy terms) leave their cocoons and somehow emerge as middle-class butterflies because they listen to Radio 3, then they no longer count as working class precisely because they listen to Radio 3. We are still stuck in this catch-22.” – Arts Professional
Jussie Smollett Is Now Getting Written Off Of ‘Empire’
Oh: “The announcement comes just days after the studio voiced its unflinching support for the actor, but that support flagged Thursday after Chicago police held a news conference delineating how the department believed Smollett staged the attack because he was ‘dissatisfied with his salary.'” – Los Angeles Times
The Worst Best Picture Winner Since ‘Crash,’ But Maybe Worse Than That One
Justin Chang of the LA Times: “Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. Green Book is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.” – Los Angeles Times