In her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argued that the standards of western female beauty were used as a weapon to stagnate the progress of women. But in medieval culture, such pressures were doubly weighted, since beauty was closely aligned with morality: beauty was associated with goodness and ugliness with evil. - The Conversation
The number of foreign, mostly Hollywood, feature films that shot in Canada jumped from 141 in 2021 to 171 pictures last year, with total budget expenditures rising from CAN$1.38 billion to CAN$1.66 billion (US$1.2 billion) in 2022. - The Hollywood Reporter
A mega-attraction devoted to the natural world may seem an odd fit for Manhattan, one of the most human-manipulated landscapes on earth. But in another sense, these urban oases of physical spectacle make more sense than ever in our digital era, when forests and deserts are often viewed largely through windshields or computer screens. - Bloomberg
The buildings stand free of any mortar or metal, which makes them more capable of shifting and flexing along with torques in the ground. This brilliance of mobility even continues underground. - Nautilus
"Audiences have been slow to return. National conversations about race put the internal practices of local theaters under a microscope. Many theater artists moved away or left the industry entirely. The government money's gone." Here's a look at how some Massachusetts theaters are handling it all. - WBUR (Boston)
In just over two years, the school acquired Opus 3 Artists, Pentatone Records, and the major London agency Askonas Holt. SFCM president David Stull explains to Jeffrey Arlo Brown what the school's up to, and Brown considers for whom all this is, and is not, a good deal. - Van
The dramatically changed landscape that inspired the walkout — an industry that’s focus-shifted to streaming content — is also going to make it tougher for viewers to even notice their protest, hardship and sacrifice. At least in the near term. - The Hollywood Reporter
As inflation persists, the country is roiled by protests against President Macron's pension reforms, and Fitch downgrades French bonds, Bruno Le Maire has drawn fury for spending his time writing sex fantasy — and hoots of ridicule for one sex scene in particular. - The Guardian
Over the past decade, our understanding of memory’s role in creativity has only grown. Researchers have linked false memories and forgetting to creative performance. And earlier this year, Schachter and colleagues published a paper that suggests that memory plays an extensive part in every stage of the creative process. - Nautilus
"Cancellation comedy permits comedians to recycle their controversies into a staged performance. A distant cousin of reality TV, the genre lets celebrity humorists reflect on scandals whose epicenter they themselves inhabit. Given the nation's bottomless thirst for spectacle, the marketability of cancellation comedy should never be underestimated." - Salon
Writer-composer Richard Thomas (not to be confused with the actor) remembers how he forgot to ask for Springer for rights clearance, how the host came to see the show and wasn't at all a diva about it, and how he asked Thomas for changes in only two lines. - The Guardian
On April 27th, Switzerland's Couleur 3 aired all-AI programming for 13 hours: the music was selected by algorithm, the scripts written by chatbots, the hosts' voices deepfaked to read those scripts — and listeners were reminded every 20 minutes that all of it was produced by bots. - ZDNET
"Returning to New York City Ballet now, after working on Broadway and on Like Water for Chocolate for the more theatrically oriented Royal Ballet (a coproduction with ABT), made him wonder: Did he still want to make that kind of pure-dance piece?" - The New York Times
