Category: issues

As the year and decade end, “it will shut its doors for the last time, becoming a glass-and-steel white elephant – and an almost-too-obvious metaphor for the crisis facing America’s newspaper industry.” – The Guardian

“The reason that it feels like nothing happened in the 2010s is that too much happened. Each cultural landmark got instantly effaced by the onrush of the next, and the next. This memory-erosion effect is one reason why it feels like something’s gone awry with our sense of time. While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call “culture-time” feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering.” – The Guardian

“The 2010s were the decade the city became an App Store: an online marketplace where our choices were closely tracked, where that data became part of the products we were using, and where digital clusters of activity displaced real-world transactions. Yes, we still go downtown for drinks, meals, and shopping experiences. But, more and more, we live in cities of the cloud.” – CityLab

“Look at the stuff. The Things. Objects. The products that overflow our commercial marketplace, designed for our consumption, that we loved, loathed, mocked, coveted, worried about, or just found so baffling we couldn’t stop obsessing about them.” – Medium

Why hasn’t the EU acted to curb Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s clearly problematic takeover of the media? (Or theatre, for that matter?) Well. “European countries have dragged their feet with Hungary’s Article 7 investigation, reluctant to question a fellow member state over an issue—media policy and regulation—that many European governments believe is a national matter. Were they to carry out an aggressive inquiry, that could set a precedent for investigations into their own domestic issues.” – The Atlantic

Troy Patterson’s choices range from Zadie Smith’s essay “Generation Why”?, through Matthew McConaughey’s nihilist scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, David Lynch’s art show, the Kylo Ren lightsaber toothbrush, Greg Tate’s MTV News lament for Prince, Lin-Manuel Miranda doing Alexander Hamilton on Drunk History, artist Cindy Sherman’s Instagram feed, and the La La Land/Moonlight Oscar night fiasco, to Patricia Lockwood’s essay “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (and 21 — sorry, twenty-one — more). – The New Yorker

In 2012, Burning Man organizers reimbursed the BLM nearly $1.4 million in expenses, a 60 per cent year-over-year increase, though the event population increased by only 4 per cent that year, according to the lawsuit. The following year, the same bill was $2.9 million, according to the lawsuit. In three years, the cost recovery charges increased by 291 per cent, and the Burning Man event population increased by 39 per cent, Black Rock City attorneys said. CBC (AP)

Not only was literature politicised: sometimes it seems that any cultural initiative had the secret services of the US or the USSR behind it. We find the Soviet Union was backing the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, whose sponsors included Leonard Bernstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. The CIA, set up in 1947, had an equivalent faith in the potency of literary debates and publications. – The Guardian

“In 2019, there was a paradigm shift in how social media, and pop culture broadly, perceived gay women. It was as if lesbian culture — its memes, language, and stories — was suddenly mainstream.” (However, writes Jill Gutowitz, “As the self-identified Overlord of Lesbian Twitter, I may have a skewed vantage point here.”) – Wired