Category: issues

“On Friday, the state education watchdog Rosobrnadzor forced the European University in St. Petersburg, a private post-graduate school for the social sciences and humanities, to halt all education activities. The order came after a St. Petersburg district court ruled that the university had violated several legal regulations.”

In Toronto’s hot real estate downtown property taxes are set to rocket. A small creative cluster at Trinity Square pays about $4,000 per month in rent for a 1,700-square-foot space. In 2016, the annual tax bill was $3,566. In 2017, it jumps to $6,808, and by 2020, it will be $11,900. The small arts groups that use the space will have to leave. They’ve protested, “but the message here is, ‘No, sorry — we don’t care.’ That really speaks to the issue: What do we want the downtown core to become?”

Last month, a conservative college group launched the Professor Watchlist, which purports to name and shame academics who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Last week, 200-odd professors at Notre Dame demanded to be included on the list alongside two of their colleagues who had already been singled out. (“This is the sort of company we wish to keep,” they said.) Now there’s a website called Free Academics where professors can join the petition to be added to the Watchlist, and more than 1,500 have signed on so far.

“On Thursday, Birmingham Rep, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Midlands Arts Centre were among organisations told they would receive heavy cuts to funding. The cuts are not out of the blue and organisations had been braced for the news. But it is the scale and, they said, lack of time to implement them that is striking.”

For starters, a lot of us make the idea too hard: “A business model is a vital concept determining the success of any organisation and not a complex formula relating to its profit-making mechanisms. A business model is just a story explaining who your audiences and customers are, what they value, and how you will be able to sustain the organisation in providing that value.”

It’s getting to be an ever more important method for raising money, and nonprofit funding consultants Peter Baeck and Sam Mitchell offer half a dozen points for development folks to keep in mind as they plan a campaign.

“The difficulty begins with the shape of Times Square—it’s narrow and lies in a slight dip in the land, increasing the feeling of crowdedness even when the space isn’t that crowded. Intuition might tell you that, to alleviate that sensation, a designer should open up the area as much as possible. Dykers explains that Snøhaetta’s approach is the opposite; the firm’s designers have found that the creation of well-placed obstacles is the key to unlocking the potential of a space, to giving people—whether they be front-of-the bull or back-of-the-bull people—the freedom to follow their instincts and shape the space for themselves.”

“Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.”

“The authorities have said the deadly fire at the Oakland warehouse, known as the Ghost Ship, trapped partygoers in a jury-rigged warren of art studios and living spaces. The loss has been deeply felt in Brooklyn. But while the deaths have stirred new introspection and prompted vows to be safer, the risky venues will persist, viewed by users as essential to emerging artists as radio was to rock ‘n’ roll.”