Category: issues

Tourists have always taken photographs. Like graffiti, it’s a very human way of saying “I was here”. But in the pre-digital age, because of the expense of film as well as high shooting ratios, you were lucky if you ended up with one usable picture. Now “influencers” can take as many photographs as they need, photoshopping and filtering until they are able to post the perfect advertisement (for that indeed is what these images are). The centering of the self to such an extent is new too, and at the expense of knowledge, exploration and adventure.

As one male character in Gossip Girl sais in a wedding toast, “In the face of true love you don’t just give up, even if the object of your affection is begging you to.” Julie Beck lays out some of the owrrying examples, from “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to “Blurred Lines” and from Say Anything to Twilight to Grey’s Anatomy.

“It’s hard to control a cough or a cranky kid’s wails. Tough to tame the artistic ambitions of bats or squirrels. And sometimes, I guess the rain gods want in on the festivities too. But most philosophers and legal scholars would agree that even the most strung-out phone addicts possess free will. Force majeure has nothing to do with Facebook.”

Since punk began as a rebellion against boredom, the dead space of commercial music production and the empty hedonism born of the hippie era’s “great sexual revolution”, it was only a matter of time until it, too, would become corrupted. A yearning for its own prelapsarian state was built into punk’s ethos.

“The Atlanta Opera and the Atlanta Ballet will be among the performing arts groups to help break in a new venue, the Performing Arts Center at City Springs on Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, during its inaugural 2018-19 season.”

“Advances in word recognition and comprehension can only make AI better at handling those kinds of requests. Machines that can better understand our questions will give us better answers. That could mean a doctor getting more accurate and actionable information with which to base a diagnosis, or a teacher more clearly representing a concept to a student.”

After asking the 10- and 11-year-olds in her French class to make a picture book with their new sentences and having them tell her that none of them could draw at all (they’d never had an art class in their young lives), The Guardian‘s Secret Teacher argues that it’s not just that arts education increases test scores in other subjects …

The report predicts changes in employment and growth for key sectors of the economy across five scenarios, which model for whether the UK remains in the single market, in the customs union, secures a transition deal, or achieves a preferable trade agreement with the EU. “In total, creative industries across the country stand to lose up to £3.3bn and 27,000 jobs as a result of a no-deal hard Brexit,” a spokesperson for the Mayor said.

Want a sense of how much pop culture has changed in the past year? Look at culture from even five or ten years ago that now suddenly seems inappropriate. “Such moments of not-okay-anymore recognition might throw the new era into starkest relief. And squabbles over what was and wasn’t acceptable — plus the accompanying self-righteousness of all parties, whether styling themselves unimpeachably correct or bravely defiant — were surely the most exhausting feature of the last year in pop culture. To dismiss wokeness as the handiwork of P.C. thought police, though, would be to ignore its reality: an altered pop-culture ecosystem, a Great Awokening in full bloom.”

Photographers Bruce Weber (Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch) and Mario Testino (the British royal family, Vogue) are accused by numerous models of coercive sexual touch and much more. “Those who said they were on the receiving end of unwanted attention felt the choice was clear: acquiesce and be rewarded with lucrative ad campaign work, or reject the approach and risk hobbling, or destroying, a career. Many said they still would not speak publicly.”