Category: issues

“P.J. O’Rourke has offered us the gallows but not the humor, the misstated problem and its ludicrous solution.”

Frank Rich: “It’s an article of faith on the right that conservative comedians, like conservative entertainment-industry workers in general, are either blacklisted by Hollywood’s liberal mafia or are in daily danger of being so, thus giving the left a near monopoly on comedy as practiced in the vast cultural swing district of American television. … Still, the hysteria of the anti-Colbert claque made me look at the right’s case again.”

The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, set top open in 2015, “has been designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta and will have a library, archive, multimedia theatre, children’s discovery zone, a great hall for international exhibitions and an ambitious museum.”

Five years after it began, “Kickstarter has funded more than 60,000 projects all over the world, from organic food companies and public parks, to photography exhibitions, museums and fashion lines. It has given life to new novels, operas and musicals, a skatepark in Philadelphia, an underwater robot, several mini satellites, and…”

“Math, reading and social studies teachers began incorporating music, visual arts and theater into their lesson plans. All Savoy students started participating in school-wide performances, for audiences packed with families and community members. And now, two years in, the school feels transformed, with students, teachers and parents happier, math and reading scores rising significantly, attendance up by a wide margin and student suspensions decreasing by almost 70 percent.”

“YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, once located in Poland but now in New York, has created a portal, Polishjews.yivoarchives.org, that presents a variety of documents, videos (from film), audio clips in Yiddish , Polish, Hebrew and Russian – all described in English.”

“The dueling directors are just part of the chaos emanating from a bitter showdown that has erupted between MoCA, as the museum is known, and the city that founded it.”

White artist Joe Scanlon “has for years showcased the life and art of ‘Donelle Woolford,’ a black female Yale graduate and artist, even hiring black female collaborators to portray her.” Artists’ collective YAMS says that’s not OK, and pulls its own work in response.

“The foundation accuses Rumney and Hélion of ‘repeatedly contradict[ing] their own position. They insist that no works other than Peggy Guggenheim’s be exhibited in the palazzo or the garden. Yet between 1999 and 2013, they were instrumental in organising 14 exhibitions of works entirely foreign to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.'”

“This comes after the Sultan of Brunei, who owns the Dorchester Collection of luxury hotels, unveiled a strict sharia (Islamic law) penal code last month. This will include death by stoning for offences such as homosexuality and adultery from next year, with other offences punished by flogging and severing limbs.”