There’s A Canadian Literature Civil War Happening Right Now, And Here’s How It Got Sparked

Steven Galloway was fired from the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program a year ago, but the unrest on social media came about when Joseph Boyden, Margaret Atwood and other authors wrote a letter asking for due process for him. “There is fallout on both sides. And the collateral damage has been pretty devastating: nastiness among colleagues and strangers, threatened friendships, sorrow.”

University Of California San Diego Lays Off 21 People From The Department Of Theater And Dance

The university asked them to reapply for their current positions at a pay cut of 25-45 percent. “The laid-off UCSD employees—some of whom have worked at UCSD and the Playhouse for up to 30 years—are concerned for their futures. They say the nine-month arrangement, as well as a demotion in pay grade, will reduce their annual incomes severely, as well as their pension and retirement benefits.”

Climate Dance: Dancing In Paris Amid Icebergs From Greenland

“All of the sounds of the ice—stop-stop-stop, melt-melt-melt, crack-crack-crack—can be transferred to the body. It was an amazing experience, in the middle of Paris, in the middle of the night, in the cold. Everything was changing, second by second. I’ve been to Iceland, and to the Faroe Islands, but I have never been surrounded by ice before. And then the people of Paris stopped to watch us, watching the ice. It was a mirror.”

Hard To Believe, But The Met Opera Is About To Do Its First Opera Written By A Woman Since 1903

The Met hasn’t performed an opera written by a woman since Ethel Smyth’s “Der Wald” in 1903. (Read that sentence one more time, and think about it hard.) So it’s a major statement for the company to be adding Ms. Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” to its history — though this is a slightly delicate matter, since she has long resisted being categorized (read: ghettoized) as a “female composer.”

We’re Hurtling Towards A Post-Job Future (Because There Won’t Be Any) What Might That Look Like?

“What would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day? I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs.”