Stars Of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Decline To Describe The Story As Feminist, And The Audience Is Not Happy

Typical of the responses at a panel following the Tribeca Film Festival screening of the opening episode was this from Elisabeth Moss: “For me, it’s not a feminist story. It’s a human story because women’s rights are human rights. … So for me, you know, I never approach anything with any sort of, like, political agenda. I approach it from a very human place, I hope.” As reporter Laura Bradley puts it, “[these] answers were much less in tune with the audience than the episode itself had been.”

Nostalgia Is Huge Business Right Now. Here’s Why

“The feeling that every advertiser wants to evoke in millennials is nostalgia; that warm, comforting sensation that one experiences when recollecting the past. People usually feel nostalgic for their own past, commonly referred to as autobiographical nostalgia. But oddly enough, they can also feel nostalgia for time periods when they weren’t alive; perhaps their parents played old music to them when they were young, and now, they associate those sensory details with positive memories.”

Smartphones And Siri Don’t Understand Icelandic, And That Has Icelanders Really Worried

The 1,200-year-old language isn’t among the many options available on smartphones, virtual assistants, voice-activated devices, and even many computers – and with a small base of speakers (fewer than 350,000), Silicon Valley has little reason to spend money to add Icelandic. The worry: “The less useful Icelandic becomes in people’s daily life, the closer we as a nation get to the threshold of giving up its use.”

Why It’s Essential That Computer Scientists Study The Humanities

“Universities should start with broader training for computer science students. I contacted eight of the top undergraduate programs in computer science, and found that most do not require students to take a course on ethical and social issues in computer science (although some offer optional courses). Such courses are hard to teach well. Computer scientists often don’t take them seriously, are uncomfortable with non-quantitative thinking, are overconfident because they’re mathematically brilliant, or are convinced that utilitarianism is the answer to everything. But universities need to try.”

Richard Florida: The Rise Of Creative Inequality

The clustering of talent and economic assets in cities is benefiting “the already privileged, leaving 66 percent of the population behind,” Florida says. “Left unchecked, this clustering force generates a lopsided, extremely unequal kind of urbanism in which a relative handful of superstar cities, and a few elite neighborhoods within them, benefit while many other places stagnate or fall behind.”

Is Classical Music Still Relevant? Sorry – But That’s The Wrong Question

“The only possibility for orchestras and opera houses to find new repertoire, with the chance that they hit upon something of real value, is to preserve a practical framework: the one which defines the fundamentals of the art form. This means ignoring the postwar modernist ideologies of progress – because there is no progress in the arts – and requiring of new repertoire that it be suited to the medium as it has developed over time.”

I.M. Pei At 100

“Over the course of his career, the aristocrat of American architects, who turns 100 on April 26, has drawn on a dazzling range of influences, from Chinese gardens to ancient Colorado cliff dwellings to the fountain in a Cairo mosque. He blended the austere modernism of the Bauhaus with opulent Beaux-Arts classicism, technological daredevilry with reverence for precedent and a minute study of the past.”

Contemporary Criticism Is Having An Identity Crisis

The primary concern of contemporary criticism is not whether a given cultural object is good or bad, but how that object reflects the realities of the social world, and how it can potentially (re)shape that same world. For Weinmann, “this new turn of criticism, this emphasis on the politics behind art, may be better for a work’s reputation than criticism that ignores politics.”