Category: issues

“Buyers are not getting the message that the purchase of such antiquities is enabling war and terror in the Middle East. ‘These are blood antiquities,’ says Altaweel, adding that attempts to make the cultural-heritage case for more action to stop trade in looted goods have not yielded results. ‘What might work more is to say that this is funding death.'”

“The end result of an AirBnB’d neighborhood is not a profitable artist collective. Rather, it’s an international bedroom community of “post-tourist” upwardly mobile workers, an intermittently empty complex of condos for creatives who can parachute in, patronize local cafes, and then escape as quickly as they arrived.”

“If a new generation of middle-class Americans chooses to move back into the inner cities, large-scale performing-arts centers might start to make fiscal and artistic sense. But even if that should happen, Lincoln Center will never again be culturally influential in the way that it was in the ’70s and ’80s.”

“The Hispanic market has grown from $1 trillion in buying power in 2010 to $1.5 trillion this year, according to Nielsen data. And Nielsen and Google surveys find members of that audience to be among both the heaviest viewers of TV and the earliest and most active users of new media technology.”

“The flag will remain charged whether publicly visible or not, and so TV Land banning The Dukes of Hazzard is a banal gesture of how little we are prepared to confront the horror of Charleston, the continuing gritty day-to-day horror of all kinds of hatred aimed at all kinds of minorities.”

“The Air and Space Museum, designed by Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum Architects (HOK), is marked by its four marble-clad pavilions, separated by three recessed steel-and-glass atria. Construction started in 1972 and continued until the museum opened on July 1, 1976. It has undergone basic repairs since, but the systems and materials are running on borrowed time in part because certain building components were “downgraded” as part of the original construction to reduce cost and hit the stunningly low $40 million budget.”

“If we want schools to be democratizing, then we need to stop and consider how computers are likely to entrench the very opposite. Unless we stop them.”

“Because rape is widely acknowledged as a Very Serious Topic, there’s also a tendency to treat rape scenes as a means to be edgy or shocking. You know, as a way of creating really serious, mature content. Most of the time, however, this approach radiates nothing so much as ignorance and immaturity.”