Category: issues

Factors including the invention of movies, a decreasing child mortality rate, and the rise of broadcast radio in the 1920s had led to an astonishing realization for society: Children had personalities. They weren’t just imperfect adults who needed to be ignored until they could behave properly, and they were becoming increasingly less likely to just drop dead, which meant it was safer to like them. They had qualities that were appealing in their own way, the most important of which was cuteness.

The aftershocks of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the backlash that followed are with us. We are still looking at dystopian and apocalyptic fantasies, still running from zombies, still watching cities erupt, still fighting over basic human rights. The movies have been conscripts in this continuing culture war and to look back at 1968 is to understand what has and hasn’t changed.

“Thanks to a new breed of neural network machine-learning algorithms, compelling yet fictitious video, images, voice, and text can be synthesized whole cloth. Photos of imaginary faces can be realistically fabricated by computers — their emotions, skin, age, and gender dialed in by a knob on a machine. … Videos of politicians can be produced as you might control a puppet. … But in a way, this technological leap could actually be good news for journalists.” (Says a journalism professor.)

A federal lawsuit filed by a Chicago nonprofit in an attempt to block the Obama Presidential Center from being built in Jackson Park accuses organizers of pulling an “institutional bait and switch” by shifting the center’s purpose away from being a true presidential library.

It is 50 pages long, penned by Bard College Berlin curator and scholar Dorothea von Hantelmann, and it was offered to all takers at the pop-up. Lest there be doubt that this pamphlet holds an answer to the lingering “why” hanging over the entire enterprise, it opens by asking grandly: “If the theater was the ritual place of Greek antiquity, the church that of European medieval times, and the museum that of modern industrial societies: What is the new ritual space for the 21st century?” For those who are still asking, “How can New York afford the Shed?” the manifesto, in essence, boldly asks back, “How can New York afford not to have the Shed?”

“More diversity among students means higher education is drawing more deeply on those who have faced economic and academic inequities that reduce their odds of success. And yet the taxpayer resources that public institutions are receiving to guide them to completion are diminishing. That’s a recipe for widening economic inequality and declining national competitiveness, as kids of color comprise a growing share of the future workforce and tax base.”