The tendency to supplement communication with motion is universal, though the nuances of delivery vary slightly. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, people point with their noses and heads, while in Laos they sometimes use their lips. In Ghana, left-handed pointing can be taboo, while in Greece or Turkey forming a ring with your index finger and thumb to indicate everything is A-OK could get you in trouble. – Quanta Magazine
Are There Really Any Reasons Left Not To Repatriate Plundered Cultural Artifacts?
“The British Museum is currently facing repatriation demands from Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Easter Island; the idea that it is a better host to the Parthenon Marbles than Athens’ state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum is preposterous, as is the idea that the Rapa Nui don’t know how to look after Hoa Hakananai’a, the Easter Island stone statue they believe is the living incarnation of a prominent ancestor.” – Prospect
Exploring A Different Way To Paint, And Center, The Black Body
Painter Elizabeth Colomba’s goals include getting Black women into Western art history – and changing how people look at Black women in general. “When you think about black women wearing a period dress, you have a tendency to think that they were serving other people, another ethnicity, and they were not in power. That’s where I break the stereotype. And that’s what sometimes makes people uncomfortable.” – HuffPost
Trigger Warnings Do Not Work, New Study Finds
“Trigger warnings are, at best, trivially helpful,” writes a research team led by psychologist Mevagh Sanson of the University of Waikato. The paper finds they “have no effect, or might even work slightly in the direction of causing harm.” – Pacific Standard
Has Instagram Become A Path To A Creative Director Career?
While many people over a certain age may see social media influencers as the demon spawn of P.T. Barnum and David Ogilvy, it has emerged as a significant advertising tool. According to a CivicScience survey in December 2018, one-third of daily Instagram users in the U.S. said they had purchased a product or service based on a recommendation from an influencer or blogger on the platform. – Fast Company
For Reading To Young Children, Hard-Copy Books Are Better Than E-Books: Study
University of Michigan researchers found that “reading print books together generated more verbalizations about the story from parents and from toddlers, more back and forth ‘dialogic’ collaboration. (‘What’s happening here?’ ‘Remember when you went to the beach with Dad?’)” – The New York Times
Peter B. Kaplan, Panorama Photographer With Absolutely No Fear Of Heights, Dead At 79
“He persuaded architects, developers and public officials to let him immortalize their buildings and monuments on film in altitudinous detail. He would scale precarious perches with construction workers and point his lens toward the ground hundreds of feet below, or mount his camera, sometimes equipped with a fisheye lens, on poles as long as 42-feet, so that he could snap the shutter remotely and even photograph himself.” (And, actually, he did have a fear of heights.) – The New York Times
When Early Newsreels Used Fake Footage To Show Real Events
When a huge earthquake killed 140,000 people in Japan in 1923, written and radio reports could get around the world quickly, but film footage couldn’t. That didn’t stop the makers of newsreels, who used special-effects tricks to recreate the event. That sort of thing was common from the earliest newsreels to the 1930s. – Gizmodo
Cloudy, Dun-Colored Sky In Van Gogh Watercolor Should Really Be Bright Pink Sunset
When conservators at the Tate Britain removed the frame on The Oise at Auvers, a corner of the canvas that hadn’t faded from exposure to light revealed what color van Gogh meant that sky to be when he painted it. – The Guardian
Successful Public Art Projects Can Transform A City (Sometimes In Not Good Ways)
Take San Antonio, Texas: Advocates say that the “Decade of Downtown” policies launched under the administration of Mayor Julián Castro—who is now running for president in part on his mayoral record—aren’t working for marginalized communities. New developments like the Latino High Line, plus the city’s rising economic fortunes, are putting inadvertent pressure on the Mexican and Mexican-American communities that these projects celebrate. – CityLab
TV Exec And Collector Blake Byrne, 83
Before he got into collecting, Byrne “didn’t even know what I liked,” he recalled in a 2015 interview with Art+Auction magazine. New York dealer Jack Tilton suggested that he attend Art Basel, and after two trips to Switzerland, he bought six pieces in 1988 on a budget of $60,000. “That was the beginning of the collection,” he said. “After I got those first six, I was bitten.” – The Hollywood Reporter
You Know The Straw Man Fallacy — Here’s The Burning Man Fallacy (Which You’ve Definitely Seen In Action)
“It is not composed simply of a single distortion, but rather a slew of mischaracterizations bent on representing one’s opponents in the worst light. … In deploying the burning man fallacy, one not only stuffs an opposing figure with straw, but then proceeds to surround it with more tinder and additional flammable material, with the intention of committing the view at issue to the flames, along with whole traditions, movements, and ways of thinking.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Those Kids Whose Rich Parents Bribe Their Way Into Elite Colleges? Here’s What It’s Like To Teach Them
“I know, because I teach at an elite American university – one of the oldest and best-known … In this setting, where teaching quality is at a premium and students expect faculty to give them extensive personal attention, the presence of unqualified students admitted through corrupt practices is an unmitigated disaster.” – The Guardian
China Allows Cinemas To Screen ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, But Only With The Gay Parts Removed
“Several minutes of footage were edited out of the film, including scenes of two men kissing and the word ‘gay’. There has been significant reaction to the film’s release online. … Though some [social media] users complained of ‘half watching and half guessing’ as a result of the deleted scenes, others were pleased the film had been released at all.” – BBC
The Problem With Kids Theatre? It’s Not Nutritious
Noel Jordan: “I compare commercial work for children with the McDonald’s Happy Meal. They think they want it, they get it, there is a buzz that comes with a little toy, it is all colourful, and then literally one minute after that meal is consumed, there is an emptiness and it is not satisfying or full or wholesome.” – The Stage
Why We Procrastinate
It’s not about self-control. Instead, it’s more like (not very good) emotion management. “Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond.” – The New York Times
Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Fiction. Should Novelists Be Worried?
Maybe not, not yet. Garbage in (this AI was fed a lot of Reddit recommendations, ahem), garbage out: “Right now, novelists don’t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ – the machine continued the narrative as follows: ‘I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.'” – The Guardian (UK)
‘Affect Theory’ And How It Explains Living In 2019 America
So what is “affect theory”? “Under its influence, critics attended to affective charge [in society]. They saw our world as shaped not simply by narratives and arguments but also by nonlinguistic effects — by mood, by atmosphere, by feelings.” Writer Hua Hsu looks at the work of one of affect theory’s main proponents today: Lauren Berlant, co-founder of the Feel Tank (as opposed to think tank) Chicago, and her idea of the “cruel optimism” Americans hang on to. – The New Yorker