Netflix has accumulated a hefty $20.54 billion in long- and short-term debt in its effort to produce more original content. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company hopes more new shows will capture more subscribers, its primary revenue driver. It’s also under pressure to keep spending on new shows as streaming rivals such as Amazon and Hulu expand their own slates of original programming.
Archives for July 2017
Data: Online Ticket-Buyers Are More Likely To Donate
The average percentage of online ticketing transactions that included donations was 15% last year, while only 3% who booked tickets over the counter or on the phone added a donation to their transactions. Of these, concert hall attenders were the most likely to donate online (19%) but among the least likely to donate by phone or in person (1%).
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler On Net Neutrality, Monopolies And The Need For Regulation
“If the reality is that somewhere between 50% and 75% of all households in America have one or fewer choices for high-speed broadband–defined as 25 megabits per second–and 95% of all households in America have one or fewer choices for 100-mbps service, there is no competition. And when there is no competition, who makes the rules? The rules are made by the monopolists. So the job of the FCC should be to stand up and protect consumers and promote competition and innovation in a non-competitive market.”
The Poet-Scientist Who Laid The Foundation For The Information Age
In 1937, at the age of 21, Claude Shannon showed how binary circuits could do logic, could even appear to “think”—the discovery behind all of our digital computers today. In 1948, at the age of 32, he published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” a paper that has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age”—in other words, a founding document that inaugurated an era.
Facial Recognition Software Eliminates Anonymity. Now The Battles For Privacy Regulations
“Facial recognition’s use is increasing. Retailers employ it to identify shoplifters, and bankers want to use it to secure bank accounts at ATMs. The Internet of things—connecting thousands of everyday personal objects from light bulbs to cars—may use an individual’s face to allow access to household devices. Churches already use facial recognition to track attendance at services.”
Laura Zucker Exit Interview: Three Biggest Challenges For The Arts
Laura Zucker is stepping down after 25 years leading the LA County Arts Commision. Three of the biggest issues facing arts administrators? “Ensuring all students everywhere receive a quality arts education. It’s a social justice issue. Valuing diverse cultural traditions equally, really equally, in terms of opportunity and resources. The democratization of culture: creating opportunities for the arts to be accessed by everyone, like breathing.”
Arts Journalism Is Disappearing. Can Arts Organizations Do Anything About It?
“Arts organizations and journalists need each other. Yet, to work together effectively, we need to change the mantra from ‘butts in seats’ to ‘civic discourse’ and work with media and the community in a mutually beneficial way. We can be conduits and facilitators, a constant resource to journalists, giving them the ability to experiment. We need to ensure our organizations are building relationships with journalists, editors, bloggers, and influencers, and researching media outlets before pitching.”
Playwright Sam Shepard, 73
One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like “Buried Child,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and “Curse of the Starving Class” and “A Lie of the Mind.”
A Brief History Of Populism (And How The Word Got Corrupted)
“The problem isn’t just using the word populist as a euphemism for racism and ethnic chauvinism. The term also helps to reproduce the very ideology that has trapped white working-class people by reinforcing the idea that they are not supposed to experience the same social and economic problems as everyone else.”
How Academic Writing Gets To Be Meaningless
“The use of words without fixed or clear meanings is a major part of what makes academic writing so terrible. People often complain that academic writing is “obscure” or overly convoluted and complex. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with either complexity or obscurity in themselves; research papers in the sciences have to be complex and technical, and introducing people to obscure and unfamiliar words or concepts can be a key part of developing human knowledge. The problem largely comes when words are vague and unclear, admitting of many possible interpretations.”
With Technology Comes Power. But It Might Make Us Less Happy
“Lives of artificial bliss handed to us on a platter of biochemical and neuroelectronic manipulation may well turn out to be stifling, unchallenging lives, and the human imagination, if it is not stunted and stupefied by virtual reality and other illusions, is likely to find unpredictable ways to subvert them. We will have found out that gods are never happy.”
Why Isn’t New Opera At Least As Smart As Good TV?
“When was the last time you came out of a new opera — or ANY opera — feeling that you had had a vital, exciting dramatic experience? When was the last time you felt you had lost yourself in another world? It certainly happens. But in general, we judge opera by different standards. We don’t expect it to be as gripping as a work of spoken theater. The long passages of music, and the pace of the singing, slow everything down.”
So Banksy’s Balloon Girl Was Voted “Best-Loved” Art Work In Britain? OMG
Under its fake radicalism, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon is the kind of sentimental tosh our great grandparents too would have voted as Britain’s best-loved. Its kitsch pathos resembles one of the most popular Victorian images, John Everett Millais’ painting Bubbles, a picture of a child blowing bubbles used as an advert for Pear’s Soap. Today we laugh at it and sneer at them for liking such soppy stuff. Imagine how future generations will mock us for sanctifying Banksy, the Boaty McBoatface of modern art.
How Is Publishing Doing Now That The We Need Diverse Books Movement Is Three Years Old?
Sometimes, publishing companies or individuals have had to start their own imprints. For instance: Salaam Reads “takes submissions directly from writers. Zareen Jaffery, the imprint’s executive editor (who is also Muslim), says this practice grew out of feedback she received from Muslim writers, who said it was difficult to find an agent.”
The Country’s First Sri Lankan Museum Is In The Basement Of A Sri Lankan Restaurant On Staten Island
And it was started, and is run, by and 18-year-old. Julia Wijesinghe says, “My friends ask me, ‘You’re from New York, why do you have so much pride for your parents’ country?’ I have one-hundred-per-cent New York pride, too. I got inspiration for my museum from going to MoMA.”
Here’s How The Internet’s Culture Wars (And Memes) Led To This Presidency
The so-called “alt-right” didn’t go for National Review style (not in any way). Instead, “they have adopted the fetishism of transgression that marked the Cultural Studies left: they embedded themselves in subcultural styles repellent to mainstream, middlebrow liberal sensibilities and they call on their armies to attack the tastes and sensibilities embodied by n00bs and ‘normies.'”
A Museum Plans To Sell 40 Paintings To Fund Its Renovations, But Here’s Why That’s A Bad Idea
Using artworks in the collection as fundraising sources a terrible message for potential art donors, not to mention the public. “One of the most fundamental and long-standing principles of the museum field is that a collection is held in the public trust and must not be treated as a disposable financial asset … Two of the works the Museum is currently planning to sell are important paintings by Norman Rockwell, given by the artist to the people of Pittsfield.”
Sergei Polunin Says Without Shedding Its Elitist Image, Ballet Will Die
Polunin, one of the art’s bigger (and certainly one of the more controversial) stars, thinks that dancers can be like soccer players or actors if they just have agents, and if the art can open itself up to top theatre and film directors.
Jeanne Moreau, The Face Of French New Wave Film, Has Died At 89
She starred in Louis Malle’s The Lovers and then François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and “went on to particularly memorable roles as Marcello Mastroianni’s lonely wife in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic The Night (1961), a controlling servant in Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), a coldhearted seducer in Eva (1962) and a vengeful newly wed-newly widowed in The Bride Wore Black (1968).”
The Rand Corporation Has An Amazing Art Collection
OK, it’s a collection on long-term loan from a software entrepreneur, but “for many of the people who work at Rand, the art is more than a backdrop. It’s part of a unique culture, they say.” Apparently it helps people consider thorny problems when there’s challenging art around them.
This Orchestra Is Asking People To Outrun Beethoven’s Fifth In A 5K
Well, that’s a new one: At its next free outdoor concert, the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra is offering “a 5K run and boot camp workout for those so inclined and a delightful outdoor evening concert of popular classics for the rest of us.”
Germany’s Most Embarrassing Musical Export
It might not even be an export. It might only be possible within Germany: “Of the current top five albums on the German charts, two are schlager records. To put it into perspective, that would be like if the number three and four albums on the US Billboard Hot 100 were Christian rock about cats.”
Trump Administration Policies May Threaten Land Around Michael Heizer’s ‘City’
Argh: Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, said, “I don’t think there’s too much question that a monument can be adjusted. Whether a monument can be rescinded or not, that is a question for the courts.”
The Surprising Ways ‘Dunkirk’ Reimagines History
Christopher Nolan’s film leaves out the enemy, for one thing. And then there’s Winston Churchill – or rather, there is no Winston Churchill in Dunkirk.
Howards End Was Fictional, But You Can Go See It Anyway
And you can visit Pemberley and Manderley, and you can visit and revist Brideshead should you so desire. (Why does British literature depend so very much on houses?)