Hoping For Easy Sales, Publishers Bring Out Their Dead

“They are the hottest authors in publishing, delivering works of murder, mystery, ribald humour and passionate love, and they all have one thing in common: they are long dead. … Authors whose newly discovered or revised works are now being published in the US include Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, JRR Tolkien, William Styron, Mary Shelley and Ernest Hemingway.”

Tate Modern Installation Left Visitors With Injuries

“Bodyspacemotionthings,” a recently revived 1971 installation by Robert Morris, “has lost none of its potential for danger after clocking up a string of casualties during a special reappearance at Tate Modern this summer. The artwork, in which participants are invited to negotiate see-saws, a tightrope and other obstacles, left 23 people needing first aid in just over week.”

Why Our Sense of Direction Is So Lousy (And Getting Worse)

“The human talent for abstraction — we can easily imagine places and spaces that don’t exist — comes with a hidden cost, which is that our mental maps of the physical world have become sparser over the course of human evolution. We’ve become hopelessly disconnected from our setting, burdened with a brain that needs a GPS satellite just to get across town.”

Arts Foot Soldiers: Buskers

“Glasgow has always had a reputation as a city of buskers. A healthy folk music scene has provided the streets with a steady supply of acoustic musicians, and the city has never been short of drunk men with tin whistles, chancing their luck in shop doorways. But the arrival of new immigrants in recent years – often accomplished musicians who bring their own countries’ traditional music to the Scottish streets – has reinforced Glasgow’s reputation as a city of buskers with above-average talent.”

The Numbers Are In: Vinyl’s Hot Again

“Vinyl LPs, as has been breathlessly touted for months, are surprisingly resurgent in the midst of this analog twilight and the ascent of portable, digital technology. Looking at the most complete sales data available (for 2008), the sales of vinyl LPs jumped an eye-popping 89 percent, from 990,000 units sold to 1.88 million units sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan’s year-end report.”

LA Movie Industry Workers Struggle As Shooting Moves Elsewhere

“Many are struggling amid a sharp drop in local film and TV production triggered by the recession, a rise in runaway production, and the fallout from a writer’s strike and a yearlong contract dispute between studios and the Screen Actors Guild. According to the state Employment Development Department, jobs in movie and television production were down 13,800 in May compared with a year earlier.”