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How Does A Film Studies Prof Teach Last Year’s Complex, Not Oscar-Nominated, Palme D’Or Winner?

Titane is not easy to parse. "Julia Ducournau is willing to explore the strange, to show us our own bodies, soft and hard, that surprise and fail us, that are the source of pain and pleasure, leak strange fluids, grow old or ugly." - Los Angeles Review of Books

What ‘Slave Play’ Means To The Actors In The Play

Antoinette Crow-Legacy says the Jeremy O. Harris play "gives me freedom to be messy and complicated and blur the lines between right and wrong." - Los Angeles Times

To Find Out How Much Medieval Literature We Lost, We’re Turning To Wildlife

A wildlife tracking method, specifically: "Mike Kestemont, computational text researcher at the University of Antwerp, and his colleagues used the 'unseen species' model, which uses a statistical approach to estimate how many species are missing from a field count." - LitHub

There’s A Boom In Horror Right Now, Especially By Women Directors

What's that about? "There’s a great artistic freedom in horror that’s perhaps not available in other genres. Obviously, in a drama, you can’t have a worm growing out of someone’s nostril, or something else so bold or artistic. But horror has really incredible freedom." - The New York Times

The Uncanny Valley Has Turned Into The Trustworthy Town Square

It's a bit alarming. "Farid and Nightingale asked participants to look at a selection of them and sort them into real and fake. Participants were correct less than half the time, with an average accuracy of 48.2%." And even with training, the percentage doesn't move much. - Fast Company

Playwright Sanaz Toossi On Language, Representation, And The Comic Potential Of Bleeding Onto The Furniture

Toossi wrote one her plays going up in New York in white-hot anger after the Trump Muslim travel ban. "If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset." - The New York Times

What A Tennessee Ban On ‘Maus’ Means For The Artists Inspired By The Book

"Maus galvanized a generation of comics creators to fill bookshelves with graphic narratives about the Holocaust and its inheritance and inspired a community of thinkers to engage analytically with these stories." Now they're also worried and angry. - LitHub

Mark Morris Says No, Artists Are Definitely Not OK Right Now

Morris, on dance rehearsal: "It was horrible. ... Everyone was freaked out. You’re scared being next to each other, and you’re scared to talk to anybody, and as soon as you touch something it’s sanitized, and then you go home and take a shower right away." - Washington Post

The Painful Experience Of An In-Person Film Festival

In Berlin, during the many nasal swab tests, "I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat." - The New York Times

Why Hasn’t The City Of Los Angeles Reopened Its Arts Spaces?

In a "totally Kafkaesque" situation, one artist's show ran without the public ever being able to see it. "All facilities overseen by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) remain closed, with no timeline for reopening or even a roadmap for how to get there." - The Art Newspaper

Why Hollywood Won’t Quit Guns

In the most heavily armed country, the presence of guns isn’t considered out of the ordinary, especially in states with open-carry laws. That familiarity extends to Hollywood sets, where guns are often treated with nonchalance. - The Atlantic

How Libraries Shape Our Literature

Books reach Americans in multiple ways these days, not only as e-books. They might arrive as audio books, in serialized form through online services, and so on. Likewise, book clubs have remained and even increased their popularity. Yet no matter how we see it, the act of reading is in decline. - LitHub

Ultimate Brag In Social Media: “I Can’t Stop Thinking About…”

If one person shouts that she can’t stop thinking about something, the natural response is not to join in her particular obsession but to yelp that you, too, have something that you are obsessed with. An unspoken competition takes place to see who can profess their passion. - The New Yorker

Reimagining NPR To Serve Everyone

In his new book, Chávez uses media industry data and 50 interviews with public media workers to argue that NPR’s growth has come at the expense of serving Latinx audiences in the U.S. - NiemanLab

Claim: NFTs Are Nothing But A Scam

I think people accurately recognize that just by watching people get involved in crypto. You watch an artist who starts selling NFTs, and over the course of months, their artwork itself shifts and it starts becoming more and more about crypto itself. - Salon

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