Category: issues

“Teachers Pay Teachers contends that it hit a milestone last year, when its 80,000 contributors earned more than $100 million, and that at least a dozen have become millionaires since the site launched a decade ago. Other major sites including Teachwise and Teacher’s Notebook, and recently such corporate players as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Amazon, have launched sites of their own. But some educators worry the increasing monetizing of lessons will stifle the longstanding practice of teachers freely sharing their ideas. And legal experts question whether teachers actually have ownership of the lessons they are selling.”

Over the course of six months, she has secretly gathered a 330-page internal police log detailing more than 2,000 cases of state-sanctioned violence against Turkish citizens over the last 11 months; she will be exposing every detail in a performance piece at this year’s Venice Biennale. Details are deliberately being kept on a need-to-know basis to avoid the very real threat of shutdown before the launch, but Onat’s headline-grabbing stunt will form part of Objection – the Pavilion of Humanity created by her and the artist Michal Cole that will transform a Venetian villa “to give an artistic home to women’s rights and freedom of speech”.

Give enough money, and the Goodman Theater will invite you to cast parties (occasionally in London as well as Chicago), the Lincoln Park Zoo might take you to Tanzania, the Adler Planetarium might take you to view a solar eclipse in China, and the Chicago Symphony might take you along on tour.

The Polish historian Pawel Machcewicz has been dismissed from his role as director of the newly-opened Second World War Museum in Gdansk, one of the world’s largest historical museums. The move comes shortly after a court ruling paved the way for a controversial merger with the still-unbuilt Westerplatte Museum, allowing Poland’s right-wing PiS government to create a new state-sanctioned institution.

The study found that cultural organizations’ strongest impact on social wellbeing is not in areas with the largest number of resources, but rather in lower-income districts where the social connections they facilitate operate as a form of capital, substituting for the financial capital available in other places. As SIAP writes: “culture makes a difference in these communities by enhancing social connection, amplifying community voice, and animating the public environment.”

In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a major address on the worldwide importance of an “internet freedom agenda”; in 2017, one could forgive her for being a bit ambivalent about that. “The internet freedom agenda presumed the benefits of the free flow of information only cut one way: in favor of open societies, values, and ideals. But we’re now seeing that its destabilizing effects cut both ways. And that doesn’t bode well for the borderless internet we enjoy today.” Ben Moskowitz considers the pros and cons.

“To go shopping and see artists at work, perhaps talk to them, watch rehearsals, maybe see performances, interact with arts education programs, poetry slams, dance companies, film makers and on and on might be a very attractive lure to the public. And that might help retailers. And this might be a golden opportunity for us to target Millennials, even younger people, and to build public will in support of the arts.”

“If you’re not getting education in school about drama and theatre studies, or if you’re not being taken on school trips, you certainly might not realise that performing is an option, and if you don’t go to those things, you will never realise that there are all these other jobs.”

Former Calgary Opera CEO Bob McPhee: “It’s an enormously sensitive topic, especially in the theatre world, and it is bleeding into the opera world. … So it’s not from a lack of wanting to be sensitive to the issue. I understand. But is there repertoire we stop doing if we can’t accomplish that goal?”