Category: issues

Sarah Ruhl: “In dictatorships, the artists are often the first to go. Or maybe they are the third to go, after the press and the intellectuals. The refusal of the president to celebrate them is a chilling and clear departure from American values. Perhaps the Trumps didn’t want to compete with the Obamas, who at the 2016 Kennedy Center awards received the longest standing ovation of the evening.”

This year (2017) was just of taste of what’s to come, the paper says. There’s political entertainment on its way, including A Wrinkle in Time and Black Panther, but that’s not all (not by a long shot). “If Trump is agreed to have killed off political satire, political history could well be taking its place.”

“There are many things we can do to reduce tribalism, strengthen our kids, and repair our universities. We—the baby boomers and gen-Xers who fill this room—we have made a mess of the clock. Left and Right, Republicans and Democrats. But we can make up for it if we can come together, admit that we messed up, and change what we are doing to kids, and to college students. We just might be able to raise a generation of kids who can care for the clock after all.”

The dilapidated 1919 structure, a former furniture store that was remodeled with an Art Deco flair in the late 1930s, has been on and off the market for more than a decade as a succession of owners unsuccessfully attempted to redevelop it as a dialysis center, a vegan restaurant, a brewery and an organic grocery store.

From the leotards in the Netflix comedy GLOW to a Janet Jackson backup dancer who got cheers of her own to the single-take episode of Mr. Robot, “these 12 blink-and-you-might-have-missed-them cultural moments of 2017 brightened up a year otherwise defined by the threat of nuclear war, natural disasters – from hurricanes to wildfires – that left hundreds of thousands homeless, a string of sexual harassment charges against some of the country’s most prominent political and entertainment figures and yet more terrorist attacks.”

“They are places for people, made by people. We might like to consider them logical places, centred on facts, but they can’t tell all the facts – there isn’t room. … Museums are a product of their own history, and that of the societies they are embedded in. They are not apolitical, and they are not entirely scientific. As such, they don’t really represent reality.”

“Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [has] unveiled plans for a new opera house and cultural complex on Taksim Square in central Istanbul … which will entirely replace the Atatürk Cultural Centre built in 1969 in memory of the great modernising founding father of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. … [The current building] is viewed as a Modernist landmark and the symbol of the progressive, secular Turkish Republic.”

Once signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the legislation will establish a task force to examine the city’s “automated decision systems”—the computerized algorithms that guide the allocation of everything from police officers and firehouses to public housing and food stamps—with an eye toward making them fairer and more open to scrutiny.

The 1 percent decline this fall was due to undergraduate enrollments, which fell by nearly 224,000 students, or 1.4 percent. Graduate and professional programs were up by 24,000 students, according to the center, which tracks 97 percent of students who attend degree-granting institutions that are eligible to receive federal financial aid.