“The problem with North Korea journalism is that you can write almost anything and almost nobody knows if it’s bunk. Then you have North Korea fiction, where you can paint a very vivid reality and readers, I imagine, will want to believe that it’s 100 percent true.” Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master’s Son, talks about how he dealt with the challenge.
“Smart Thinking” Books – Self-Help For Smart People?
“It has been called intelligent self-help, but since most potential readers would not appreciate the implied association with the dumber varieties, “smart thinking” has a certain advantage.”
The Onion Breaks The Story: National Endowment For The Arts To Award $80 Million For Talentless Hacks
“The independent federal agency said it intends to provide the nation’s exceptionally unskilled and deluded artists with cash grants ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 in order to sway them from continuing with their derivative and atrocious work, thereby significantly bolstering the overall quality of art in the United States.”
Another Free Streaming Music Service, This One From Samsung
It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Hey Classical Musicians, You Need To Learn Folk Music
“Even teachers who know very little about traditional music could assign interesting fiddle tunes to their students as a break between scales and etudes. It would be a moment in the middle of a practice session to reflect on just how much musical tradition exists in America. It would be a moment to recognize that most, if not all music comes, in some way, from folk traditions.”
Ned O’Gorman Wanted To Give Kids ‘Literature, Latin, And Love’
“‘I was merely a fool poet,’ he said, ‘with nothing but poetry in his bag, hoping the energy and joy that brought poems from chaos would carry me to the children.’ The school, the Children’s Storefront, has flourished in three adjoining townhouses on East 129th Street, becoming a fully accredited, tuition-free school with a $4 million budget and a student body of about 170 children, from prekindergarten through eighth grade.”
Loving Good Books Doesn’t Make You A Good Person
“Ted Kaczynski was not improved by his obsession with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, nor Timothy McVeigh by his fascination with The Turner Diaries. Mark David Chapman was not healed by his love of The Catcher in the Rye. The disturbed reader—or, in my case, the merely immature reader—won’t always be ennobled simply by cracking open a great book.”
You Might Want To Sit Down: The Arts Aren’t Expanding Access To Jobs In The Arts
Um … “Barriers to the industry include the requirement for high-level qualifications and the preference of employers to use unpaid workers, the report says. Another obstacle is the need for industry newcomers to have an informal network of ‘insiders’ within the sector before they can secure a job.”
How An Orchestra Looks Affects How You Think It Sounds
“Participants across the board were better at identifying the more accomplished groups by watching them, not by listening to them. In fact, even when music and video were combined in clips, it was actually harder for participants to identify the top groups than by video alone.”
Yes, White People Should Belly Dance (If They Do It Respectfully)
“Appropriation can be insensitive or disrespectful in all sorts of particular instances. But often, it is wonderful.”
Are TV Cases Clogging The UK’s Criminal Courts – And Should The Punishment Become Less Dire?
In 2012, “180,000 people were prosecuted for not paying their licence – which is needed to watch or record live broadcasts on any device – accounting for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions that year.”
Breathing New Life Into Books Long After The Author Dies
“Somewhere between the provocative rethinking of canonical literature and the fan-fiction mashup, there lies the polite posthumous pastiche.”
Women, Art, And Engineering At The Google Cultural Institute
“I realised that a lot of women’s work was not well documented. I wanted to keep working on a project that would group together information and archives about women artists, and I thought the best vehicle for that would be the web.”
Martha Graham Company Strugles To Come Back After Internal Struggles And A Flood
“The estimated damage came to more than $4 million, a daunting sum for a company with an annual budget of just under $5 million that, in 2000, was forced to suspend operations for two years because of crippling debts.”
Gender Gap: Study Reports Lack Of Top Women Directors At North American Museums
“Women run just a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States and Canada, and they earn about a third less than their male counterparts, according to a report released on Friday by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization.”
Stepping Out – Retirement Is Tough For Dancers
“The great majority of current dancers claim to be aware of the challenges that transition will pose (98 percent, 86 percent and 93 percent in the U.S., Switzerland and Australia, respectively), but many former dancers concede that they were in fact ill-prepared for this process.”
Does Getty’s New Free Image Policy Mean Others Will Follow?
“The change has been greeted like some kind of major capitulation. But that’s actually not quite true: This is merely the latest move in a slow shift toward a new and more realist take on digital monetization — a shift that’s been going on for years.”
Chairman Of The Sydney Biennale Steps Down Under Protest
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis “left as more artists said they would pull out of the event in protest over its main sponsor, his family’s construction company Transfield Holdings. The firm provides services for the Australian government’s controversial immigration detention centres.”
Study: Big Gender Gap In Pay For Museum Directors
“It found that female directors at museums with budgets of more than $15 million earn 71 cents for every $1 male directors earn. At the same time, women who run art museums with smaller budgets do earn more than their male counterparts – annually, they earn 2 cents more.”
Rising New York Rents Pushing Artists Out Of The City
Being studioless, some have put their art careers aside. Others have begun to ask: If they can’t afford gritty, unglamorous Industry City, then where?
“Inherent Dullness”: A Young Man Goes To An Orchestra Concert
“I had trouble enjoying myself. My brother did too. This by no means is to suggest that the orchestra itself was poor. Perhaps me and my bro are just uncultured, southern swine. More likely it was just not for us (and by extension a lot of people in my age range). I enjoy symphony music. I have a playlist of classical music on my Spotify. But I thought sitting and watching the orchestra play has an inherent dullness.”
How Science Is Trying To Look Inside Your Soul
If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you.
A Century of Dance in America, On Walls in Washington
Alastair Macaulay visits the “exuberantly diverse” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, “Dancing the Dream”, which features everyone from Vernon and Irene Castle to Rudolf Nureyev to Shirley Maclaine to Isadora Duncan to Mark Morris to Twyla Tharp to John Travolta to Gypsy Rose Lee.