Category: issues

“The American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report on Monday condemning its former president, Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, for inflating her résumé and influencing the academy’s procedures in order to increase her pay far beyond that of leaders of similarly sized organizations.”

A.O. Scott remembers how, in his youth, the popular idea of the borough was what you saw in The Honeymooners, Saturday Night Fever, Welcome Back Kotter, and Spike Lee’s early films. Today it’s Portlandia-East, the scene of Girls – a change that Lee decries but arguably helped bring about.

“[Karlheinz] Essl, the owner of the Austrian DIY firm bauMax, is hoping to sell the 7,000 works in his collection to the Austrian state in an effort to bail out his struggling business and save 4,000 jobs.”

“Even when certain words are necessary to the understanding of a story, the media frequently resort to euphemisms or coy acrobatics that make stories read as if they were time capsules written decades ago, forcing us all into wink-wink-nudge-nudge territory.”

“The internet is a great opportunity for black comedy, Asian comedy and frankly anybody who wants to get their work on TV but cannot get through the gatekeepers.”

“Two of Canada’s highest profile magazines have been told by the Ontario Ministry of Labour to immediately end their internship programs after complaints about unfair labour practices.”

“One troubling feature of slave narratives is the process of a white person, typically male, having to authenticate the story. Never mind that the author lived to tell the tale. It still wasn’t real unless it was co-signed by a presumed credible source.”

“As tensions escalate with countries that were once touchy allies, what we need are more Fulbright grantees in the world, not fewer. Sure, $30 million seems like a lot of money—but it’s actually 0.06 percent of the proposed total State budget.”

“Radical breaks in style are technically gender neutral, and there are certainly men who have roamed among forms, styles, and even media. I am speaking of a tendency, one that seems to be more noticeable in women working in the twentieth century and beyond, perhaps owing to the fact that more work by women has found its way into the world since 1900.”

Twenty years ago, the Colombian city was a center of the worldwide cocaine trade, notorious for gun violence; even ten years ago the place was considered unsafe. Now it’s considered a hotbed of innovation.