Category: issues

Every fake Prada handbag represents a lost sale for Prada. But a dirty little secret is that Prada rip-offs can also function as free advertising for real Prada handbags–partly by signaling the brand’s popularity, but, less obviously, by creating what MIT marketing professor Renee Richardson Gosline has described as a “gateway” product.

A sense of the level of public debate over arts funding in Kansas (read comments section at the bottom of this article).

“Gov. Sam Brownback eliminated state funding for arts programs Saturday, leaving the Kansas Arts Commission without a budget, staff or offices, as he signed a new spending plan that also cut aid to public schools and made reductions across state government.”

“A rarely discussed form of self-censorship happens routinely on college campuses. Professors and graduate students choose not to tackle academic arguments that involve music, movies, or other forms of popular culture. They worry that including relevant clips in their work means the hassle and expense of getting copyright permission for each snippet.”

“Many colleges now have the ability to digitize a wide variety of collections for broad use but frequently back away. And that reluctance harms scholarship, because researchers end up not using valuable documents if they can’t afford to fly to a distant archive to see them.”

“Does Congress have the constitutional right to remove works from the public domain? And if it does, what’s stopping it from plucking out even more freely available works?”

“Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative is a long-held obit trope, its logic coming from both an Emily Post courtesy to the bereaved combined with a generally charitable and understandable ‘don’t kick them when they’re down.’ Of course, obit charity can go overboard (it’s not so hard to imagine some well-meaning basement scribe of the moment writing, ‘No one brought more pride to a disheartened nation in so short a time as did Mr. Hitler’).”

Jeff Jarvis looks at journalists’ live-blogging and tweeting their reporting from recent news hot spots – the Missouri tornado site, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Canadian election campaign and South by Southwest – and suggests that more reporters’ time should be spent simply gathering and uploading information. Rewrite editors can create an article from the raw material later – if necessary.

“Sadler’s Wells, The Barbican Centre and the Young Vic are among venues taking part in Shubbak – the first ever pan-London festival of contemporary Arab culture. The cross artform event, which features organisations from the sectors of theatre, dance, architecture, literature, film, visual arts and music, will take place throughout the city for three weeks from July 4 to 24.”

“The past 10 years have been a vivid tutorial in the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, ‘the medium is the message’. The rise of 24/7 pay-TV and the concomitant decline of traditional network news has fragmented the old collective audience. Today disparate groups receive the same news, but filtered through a different angle of the political prism. Web commentary has split these primary colours into a thousand graded hues.”