Category: issues

“These are the tools, practices, and communities that can make online life not a flight from conversation, but a flight to it. But we will not realize these opportunities as long as we cling to a nostalgia for conversation as we remember it, describe the emergence of digital culture in generational terms, or absolve ourselves of responsibility for creating an online world in which meaningful connection is the norm rather than the exception.”

“Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.”

When one black waiter in Mississippi dared to tell NBC in 1966 what he thought of his white customers, he became a marked man. Now another documentary retells his story – and the story of what happened to him and his family in the years since he spoke up.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that may kill off the legal basis for sharing (many) books. Then what will libraries do?

“Each will receive an unrestricted, multi-year cash grant of $225,000, plus as much as $50,000 more in targeted support for retirement savings and audience development. Creative Capital, DDCF’s primary partner in the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards, will also offer the awardees the opportunity to take part in professional development activities, financial and legal counseling, and grantee gatherings–all designed to help them maximize the use of their grants.”

“What’s happened is an astonishing burgeoning of galleries every place on St. Claude Avenue. The movement started with a handful in 2008, and now there are arguably more galleries run by broke artists on this one-mile strip, per capita, than in any city of comparable size in the United States.

“The J. Paul Getty Trust, the visual art world’s ultimate one-percenter with about $8 billion in net assets, has decided that it can’t get by on investment income alone and will begin raising money in earnest to pay for special projects.” The Trust’s president assures us (of course) that its fundraising won’t poach support from other cultural institutions.

“The artist Kutlug Ataman’s themes of identity, freedom and oppression are being literally stitched together into a performance for an Istanbul theater festival next month, inspired by a road trip that unraveled because of the Arab Spring. With the help of his audience, he is creating his version of a Bayeux Tapestry, in the hopes that one day it will help to decipher today’s Turkey.”

“The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary … They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly … [Now] the venerated AP Stylebook [has] publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. ‘We now support the modern usage of hopefully,’ the tweet said. ‘It is hoped, we hope’.”

“In the end, usage really isn’t related to grammar or logic but is a realm of fashion. And this cuts both ways. Just because something is, linguistically, grammatical English doesn’t mean it’s expedient to use it. It’s like wearing jeans or a suit. Clothing tastes, like grammar instruction, were once rigidly prescriptive, too.”