Category: issues

“The nation’s heritage has been used as a weapon to finance bloodshed, to settle sectarian scores and to erase entire chapters of the country’s past in the expectation of radically reshaping its future.”

Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart (who says she’s “dancing on the grave of gay culture”): “As our culture evolves toward a more humane, accepting attitude toward gay people and their relationships, it makes sense to ask: Is there any place for a gay culture in this bright new future? … Should the wider LGBTQ community really be spending time, energy, and emotional bandwidth on pleas to preserve gay spaces?”

June Thomas: “It’s perfectly possible, normal even, to treat queer culture like a drop-in center: read a gay novel now and then; go out on a jaunt with a lesbian bird-watching group occasionally; take in a drag show once every decade. Those things will continue to exist and thrive if enough people are interested in them. Otherwise, they’ll disappear, only to be memorialized in queer studies monographs; collected in lesbian herstory archives; and remembered with fondness by the folks who enjoyed them in their heyday.”

“Consumers don’t lose a wink of sleep over purchasing derivative works — after all, it’s a bargain. But this landscape is quite different for small fashion houses and young designers, who struggle to brand themselves with distinctive designs before they are copied.”

The winners of a prize for worst architecture squabble about who’s to blame, but “whichever party bears ultimate responsibility, these decisions have real consequences for city-dwellers.”

“This tragedy will bring a wellspring of creativity in spoken word, dance, film, and stage. I hope to see more workshops of this kind come to St. Louis with more frequency. Workshops like this should be done on a regular basis to keep artists in touch with the community at large, our artistic counterparts, and colleagues.”

“Amazon is willing to upset some customers and authors as it pursues a long-term strategy for books.”

“Dissenting cultural figures have become the new focus of pro-Kremlin witch hunts, with state media treating them as a political force and accusing them of treachery. The practice has echoes of Soviet times, when cultural figures perceived as a threat to the regime … were subjected to vicious smear campaigns.”

“For the last century—for as long as Americans have been a mostly city-dwelling people—we have been finding new and inventive ways to hate city life, and to oppose the densification of cities both as a matter of ideology and of policy.”