Category: issues

“Dating from 1426, early in the reign of boy-king Henry VI and not long after the death of Chaucer, the Great Barn was one of several built in an area now largely swallowed up by the outer west London suburbs.” After nearly being knocked out for a Heathrow runway and sold to a neglectful developer for £1, the barn now belongs to English Heritage.

“The question now is whether the people who got mobilized around SOPA and PIPA, called their senators and congresspeople, and agitated on the Internet, will become a political force by making clear that candidates’ record on Internet issues will be an important factor in their voting decisions. That is not yet clear. So it was definitely a short-term victory but we will see whether it will be a long-term victory.”

“Have we been too narrowly focused on income inequality when we should really be focused on a more fundamental issue: ensuring everyone has access to a minimum level of basic goods and services such as education and healthcare and an equal opportunity to earn a respectable living?”

“Historically, we haven’t looked for government funding until, like the Los Angeles Opera in 2009, our backs were against the wall. It’s easier and faster to ask for money from our friends, and the success rate is higher. … We owe it to those donors who have gotten us this far to knock on government doors the way we knocked on theirs. And we owe it to the next generation to ensure that art doesn’t become truly elitist.”

What if our audiences are confined by our predetermined ideas about what they are? A professor who began to get hundreds of thousands of views online wonders why he confines himself to a classroom with only a few dozen students.

In a recent Tonight Show segment on presidential candidates’ vacation homes, Leno and his writers used, for the retreat of the famously wealthy Mitt Romney, an image of the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine. In response, an Indian-American Sikh has filed a lawsuit against the comedian.

“Of course, it is difficult to find a slate of candidates clamoring to join the typical arts organization board. And that is particularly true for those candidates every organization wants – the well heeled, people of color, business and civic leaders, people with cachet.”

“The story of how the Judah L. Magnes Museum – whose collection of Judaica is the third largest in the country – became the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, … has much to do with the evolution of the American identity museum, with its chronicles of ethnic liberation amid hardship.”

“With the coffers for maintaining cultural sites quickly running dry, the authorities say they had little choice but to make the Acropolis — along with dozens of other revered sites like Delphi and Ancient Olympia — more attractive to foreign film crews, advertising firms and publishing houses by slashing the cost of permits.”

“The web-wide protest launched last Wednesday against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) made this much clear: Whatever happens with the ill-conceived legislation, which could essentially shut down any site at any time for vague ‘copyright violations,’ the larger battle has already been won.”