In mid-May, the respected culture journal announced, with no explanation, that the entire board of directors and senior staff, as well as half a dozen other staffers, were leaving the following week. Since then, Rail co-founder Phong Bui has reclaimed his former title of Publisher and said that he has hired new staff and plans to double the pay for freelance reviewers by the end of this year. As for his former colleagues, Bui says, “I think people agree that stepping down is the way to let me rebuild the Rail the way I see it.”
Understanding Consciousness Isn’t Just A Scientific Issue, It’s A Moral One
“Debating whether other beings are conscious can sometimes feel like an unimportant academic exercise. But it’s not. The conclusion we reach determines how we treat animals – our livestock, our research subjects, and our neighbors in cities and other places we live.”
How Big Data Is Replacing Execs’ Taste And Intuition At The Center Of The Music Biz
“Whereas in the past, the industry relied primarily on sales and how often a songs were played on the radio, they can now see what specific songs people are listening to, where they are hearing it and how they are consuming it.”
How Canada’s First Nations Are Reclaiming Their Stories
“The whole notion of Canadian culture is a very peculiar thing, driven by what are referred to unfortunately in English as founding nations – the English and French – which is just so not true since there was over 300 distinct First Nations there.”
Was Netflix Cannes Screening Sabotaged?
“The film appeared misframed on the big screen, which hadn’t been masked properly, resulting in the top and the bottom sections of the imge being cut off. The tech problems quickly led to boos from the assembled international press corps. Shortly after the film began, the screening was abruptly suspended. The technical malfunction lasted approximately 10 minutes before the film was restarted and correctly projected. The crowd both cheered and booed when Netflix’s logo re-appeared on the screen.”
Composer Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s Spiritual Music Comes To Light
“After John Coltrane’s death, there wasn’t an easy road ahead for a musician like her. His legacy was enormous. At the time, jazz was nearly completely dominated by male players. And Alice’s own music was experimental, to say the least. Even so, she made a string of albums for major jazz labels in the 1960s and 70s.” Then she started to withdraw from commercial music, and she founded an ashram.
Is Alejandro Iñárritu’s Virtual Reality Project Film? Social Activism? Or What?
“Titled ‘Carne y Arena,’ the project has both Hollywood bona fides — it is partly funded by the studio heavyweight Legendary Entertainment — and the stamp of the art house community, for which Cannes is a holy site. … ‘Carne y Arena’ tells the story of Latin American immigrants who are attempting to cross into the United States via the Arizona desert when they are spotted and caught by U.S. authorities.”
How Do Late-Night Hosts Keep Up With Breaking News?
The writers have to keep track of breaking news alerts, for one thing. For instance, when news broke that the president had disclosed classified info to the Russians, one writer knew he couldn’t continue tweaking an entirely different script. “It was just like, ‘Ahhh — hang on, folks.’ … The first act of their show was rewritten on the fly.”
Center Theatre Group In Los Angeles Turns 50
And its 50th anniversary celebration wasn’t just a big party with a lot of celebrities. Charles McNulty: “The show, which was produced and directed with finesse by Robert H. Egan, reflected on CTG’s legacy not simply to indulge in nostalgia but to sharpen the theater’s mission as it moves into a future that promises to be every bit as impossible — culturally, politically and economically (let’s not even bring up the traffic) — as the past.”
On The 150th Anniversary Of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Birth, It Might Be Time For A Reassessment
Rowan Moore is not in love with Wright. “Of all the architects officially designated great, he provokes in me a special allergy. It is not that he was a fantasist, liar and egomaniac who left a trail of emotional destruction in his wake, nor that his buildings leaked and crumbled and went many times over budget, nor that the chairs he designed fell over and defied basic norms of comfort, nor that he wrote and spoke pure, shining, transcendent, transparent nonsense, nor that he was a hypocrite who preached democracy and freedom but flirted with tyrants such as Mussolini and Stalin.”
Revealed: Facebook’s Guidelines For Nudity, Violence, Threats And More
Some of the guidelines are, well, a little unexpected: “‘Generally, imagery of animal abuse can be shared on the site. Some extremely disturbing imagery may be marked as disturbing.’ Photos of animal mutilation, including those showing torture, can be marked as disturbing rather than deleted. Moderators can also leave photos of abuse where a human kicks or beats an animal.”
Top AJBlogs Stories For The Weekend Of 05.21.17
Deleting the Formal at Classical Concerts
Start with the music. It’s such a simple idea. Last night I went to a symphony choral concert: the Cincinnati May Festival with the symphony and the huge chorus and some soloists. As we took … read more
AJBlog: The Bright RidePublished 2017-05-21
Can art corrupt our politics?
At Time magazine, Alex Melamid suggests it can, that the infantilism found in (some) works of modern art has led us, in the end, to an infantile president of the United States: Whatever the intelligentsia … read more
AJBlog: For What it’s WorthPublished 2017-05-20
Readers Report: The Wrap-up
Rifftides readers replied in droves to our request for news about what you are listening to these days. Here is the final installment, which provides further evidence of the impressively wide range … read more
AJBlog: RiffTidesPublished 2017-05-20
Please Insert
My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brownshould be inserted like an unsheathed stallion’s penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . … read more
AJBlog: Straight|UpPublished 2017-05-19
Did Sex Kill The Love Song?
A study says yes. “The research analysed 1,250 songs released between 1960 and 2008, and found that, while only 7% of songs from the 60s were about sex, that number had increased to 40% by the end of the study.”
What’s The Answer To Some Pressing Education Problems? Why, Digital Comics (Obviously)
Yes, comics. Comics “tap into fundamental aspects of human cognition,” and kids who are having problems concentrating, analyzing, and understanding academics – and kids who are having anger issues – learn to stay calmer, analyze plots, write stories and more.
British Writers Aren’t Cool With Hollywood’s ‘Pathetic’ Treatment
Part of the problem, award-winning screenwriters say? Directors. “The generally held view is that the director is all-powerful. You never hear a writer mentioned. Hardly ever. They don’t say ‘this is a marvellous film written by’ but ‘this is a wonderful film directed by.’ … There’s nothing you can do to change it, but that’s how the industry is. The director has taken over the whole film world.”