Category: issues

Matilda lavishly depicts the true story of Czar Nicholas II’s affair with a ballerina – but the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the Czar in 2000, and now there have been Molotov cocktails, arson, and threats to burn down (or blow up) movie theaters that show the film.

That, from the creator of Hamilton, comes after the man supposed to be running the country claimed that hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico “wanted everything done for them.” Miranda added, repeated his claim and added quite a bit more, and you can see it all (of course) on Twitter.

“The images spread as they do because, taken together, they can seem to reveal hidden truths about a president who remains, for all his spotlighting and swaggering, a cipher. This is an era, after all, in which the American public, primed with Making a Murderer and American Crime Story and NCIS, embraces forensic analysis as a form of entertainment. In that context, each new image of the president, and each image of the people and things surrounding him, takes on not only the quality of art—provocative, illustrative, asking to be analyzed—but also the quality of a mystery.”

Chris Jones writes that the deal “is, at its core, an acknowledgment that it is no longer viable for even a world-class institution like the Lyric to sustain, maintain, operate and program a huge opera house entirely with productions of the repertory for which it was built.” But there’s more to it than that, Jones finds, and the benefits aren’t only about saving money.

Policy governing Canadian culture – the government considers everything from movies and television to virtual reality under this umbrella – is wide-ranging and the broadcasting, media and cultural industries are worth nearly $50-billion. Changes this broad haven’t been seen in more than a quarter-century.

UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein “found that differences in local labor markets – for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities – and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. ‘We can’t educate people out of this problem,’ he says.”

Yes, for years the right-wing media complex has been accusing Snopes of liberal bias whenever it fact-checks a lie or myth the right likes, and in today’s climate that situation has only gotten worse. Add to that the very bitter divorce of the site’s founders, David and Barbara Mikkelson, and a financial dispute between David and the site’s new co-owners that includes accusations of embezzlement, and Snopes is having a rough time of it.

“When the Kimmel programs the plaza and streetscape, as it does with festivals and summer solstice parties, the vibe is superb. … But when there’s nothing going on there, as is the case many daylight hours during the week, it’s just you, a security guard or two, and the psychic tumbleweeds. To have Center City charged with workers, shoppers, and students as the Kimmel sleeps is an oddly squandered opportunity at a time when the arts are looking for all the friends they can get.”