Category: issues

With all the talk of economic calamity and the very real potential for an extended recession in the US, arts groups are bracing for impact. “To prepare, they’ve been making lists of potential cuts, enacting hiring freezes, and shifting reserve funds so they’re better protected and easier to get at.”

“Uncertain economic times have shaken Central Florida’s arts and cultural community. State funding for the area’s cultural groups was cut 52 percent from 2007 to 2008, and nine of the 15 largest organizations funded by United Arts of Central Florida wound up last year in the red.”

“But like any other panic-inducing assumption, the “graying audience” theory bears examining, much as did the widely quoted – and since disproved – ‘fact’ from a 1986 Newsweek article that a single woman over 35 is less likely to get married than to be attacked by terrorists. (Well, at least the poor thing has tickets to the symphony.)”

One historian suggests that the real antecedent of the current financial crisis isn’t the crash of 1929. “In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls ‘the real Great Depression'” – the Panic of 1873.

A Stanford researcher has laid out seven reasons that terrorists so often fail to achieve their ostensible goals – and suggests that the primary reason people join terrorist groups is not at all what we might have thought.

“Expressions of southern Ontario’s diverse culture and arts will be a major part of Toronto’s bid for the 2015 Pan American Games… [The chair of the organizing committee] hopes to involve universities, colleges and other existing arts and cultural institutions in hosting seminars, debates, exhibitions and performances, as well as issues such as the environment and hemispheric trade.”

“[Joe] Redner is the multimillionaire owner of the [strip club] Mons [Venus] and self-described ‘father of the nude lap dance.’ But after waging years of tireless (and colorful) campaigns on behalf of civil rights, he’s achieved the unlikeliest title of all: political folk hero.”

“Some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics, and higher academic standards.”

— is that it doesn’t work. The author of the much-challenged book The Golden Compass says that “they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something – book, film, play, pop song, whatever – is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don’t the censors realise this?”

Jason Calacanis, founder of the Silicon Alley Reporter and the search engine Mahalo.com (powered by actual humans), says that “50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months.”