“Can good writing truly be taught? Is the traditional workshop structure—a writer stays silent while her peers lay bare her pages—good pedagogy or licensed cruelty? What people, and what size bank accounts, are allowed safe passage through exclusive academic programs? And, more importantly, what effect do all these factors have on the writer herself?” – The Walrus
Is The Reason Movie Comedies Are Failing This Summer A Culture Wars Thing?
“Part of me wonders if audiences aren’t giving these movies a pass because, like everything else, our comedies have gotten wrapped up in the interminable culture war.” – Washington Post
How ‘The Most Complex Archaeological Rescue Mission Of All Time’ Saved The 3,200-Year-Old Temples Of Abu Simbel
Egyptian President Nasser’s Aswan Dam project involved flooding an area full of ancient monuments, including Ramses II’s famous temple complex at Abu Simbel. So, in 1960, UNESCO and the Egyptian government organized a massive international project to move the monuments beyond the reach of the floodwaters. – National Geographic History
The ‘Scrubber Bar’ Changes Everything About Listening To Music
That line at the bottom of the screen of a digital music player that shows the length of the recording at the right and has a cursor showing how far along you are? That’s the scrubber bar. And you can use your mouse on that cursor to skip ahead or behind to any particular point in the recording. That gives a listener control over the time element of a piece of music — and, music being a time-based art form, this (though we may not realize it) completely changes a listener’s relationship to music. Brandon Lincoln Snyder digs into that change. – NewMusicBox
In The 60s Publishing Consolidated And Became Big Business. Here’s How It Changed What Gets Published
“I built this model to investigate whether nonprofits are, as they claim, more literary than conglomerates. The results allow me to extend recent computational studies into literariness and answer yes.” – Public Books
Social Workers Are Joining The Staffs Of Some U.S. Public Libraries
With public libraries open to the entire public, librarians in recent years have been seeing needs for services that their MLS programs didn’t train them to provide — from aiding job seekers to assisting growing numbers of people experiencing homelessness to treating drug overdoses. So some library systems have begun hiring resident social workers, who say that the lack of any stigma around going to a library makes it easier for people who need their help to ask for it. – NPR
Andrea Camilleri, Author Of The Detective Montalbano Series, Has Died At 93
Camilleri picked up the Sicilian-Italian mystery series mantle almost by accident: At 69, he thought he was a “sloppy” writer who would be served by trying to write mysteries. To put it mildly, that worked. – The New York Times
What Is That Odd Ungrammatical Language People Are Using On The Internet?
Today, thanks to the development of autocorrect, we could all easily write “correctly,” and yet, as Gretchen McCulloch notes, we don’t. We override automatic capitalization when our phones provide it, if it doesn’t suit our purposes. We purposely “misspell” and “misuse” words, ignore and overuse punctuation marks, and modify the basic rules of grammar. Hell, we even retype a keyboard smash (like “asdjhfksaskd,” which I just typed three times) if it appears insufficiently smashy. – The Baffler
‘Russian Ark’ Director Closes His Film Foundation, Citing Hostility From Putin’s Government
Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, Faust, Father and Son, Mother and Son) set up the Primer Intonatsii (Example of Intonation) foundation in 2013 to aid young Russian filmmakers. But the organization has had trouble getting and maintaining funding and suffered what Sokurov called “unfriendliness and aggressiveness,” including an embezzlement investigation, from Russia’s Ministry of Culture. (Yes, Sokurov is a critic of Vladimir Putin.) – The Hollywood Reporter
These Two Guys Mean To Become The Kings Of Temporary Theatre Venues
Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds first became business partners in 2015, when they designed and built the pop-up theatre in London that housed Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. “Out of that experience came Troubadour Theatres, their new company … [which has] developed a reusable, modular construction kit that can turn an empty site into a huge temporary auditorium in 12 weeks.” – The Stage
Fabio Luisi Resigns As Music Director Of Florence’s Maggio Musicale
Luisi, music director of the Zurich Opera House and former principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, only took up the post (one created for him) at the Tuscan music festival-cum-opera house in April of last year. He’s leaving, one year into a five-year contract term, as a result of one of the political power struggles that seem to afflict Italian cultural institutions regularly. – Musical America
Portland Opera General Director Steps Down
Christopher Mattaliano, who was hired as general director in 2003, will instead become an artistic consultant for the opera company, starting with the upcoming 2019-20 season. Effective immediately, Sue Dixon, Portland Opera’s current director of external affairs, will step in as interim general director. – Portland Mercury
Cultural Appropriation And The Erasing Of Culture
“There is no pride in using Indigenous peoples as props in a settler fantasy; there is no pride in racist caricatures; and there is no pride in cultural appropriation. Because my culture is not a costume. My culture is alive in the here and now. It is memory, flesh, and fire. It is the strength of all my relations.” – Hyperallergic
When An Ex-Undocumented-Immigrant Actor Plays A Guard Holding Refugee Children In A Border Jail
In George Brant’s solo play Tender Age, actor Carlo Albán (whose parents brought him from Ecuador to the U.S. as a child) plays a Latino Texan who takes a job as a guard in a Brownsville Walmart-turned-detention center for children who’ve fled Central America. Peter Marks travels to the O’Neill Theater Center to see the play in development. – The Washington Post
Orange County’s New Age Crystal Cathedral Becomes A Catholic Cathedral
Cost savings may have been a motivating factor for the purchase. As cathedrals go, the diocese picked it up for a song, just $57.5 million. Some see the deal as an act of architectural preservation, if not devotion. – Washington Post
‘Even Science Isn’t An Exact Science’: On The Art Of Science Journalism
Randi Hutter Epstein: “Nothing in science is 100 percent certain. Scientists talk in probabilities. That’s why doctors never say ‘guarantee.’ They say things like ‘chances are.’ … How do I convey discovery without sensationalizing? How do I convey the murkiness of the scientific process without killing my story?” – Literary Hub
Chimpanzees, Like Humans, Bond By Watching Movies Together
“A study of apes watching videos suggests human social bonding may have deeper evolutionary roots than previously thought. … Researchers said they found that the animals approached their partner faster, or spent more time in their company, [after watching a video together] than when they had attended to something different.” – Yahoo! (Press Association UK)
More Sexual Misconduct Accusations Against Opera Star David Daniels Emerge
A new court filing in the lawsuit by former student Andrew Lipian against the countertenor and the University of Michigan (where he is tenured faculty) “cites a handful of witnesses who spoke to the UM Office of Institutional Equity, tasked with investigating on-campus sexual misconduct, indicating they were aware of or had experienced sexually inappropriate conduct by Daniels.” – MLive (Michigan)
National Gallery Swaps Out Most Of The Objects In Its Major Summer Show
“Starting in April, it took 18 workers 25 days to install more than 250 priceless pieces in ‘The Life of Animals in Japanese Art,’ the National Gallery of Art’s summer exhibition that has delighted visitors and drawn critical raves. But two weeks ago, about halfway through its 11-week run, the museum gave much of it a makeover. On purpose.” – The Washington Post
Baltimore Symphony Management Releases Most Recent Audit, And It’s Even More Dire Than You Thought
“The audit, conducted by SC&H Group and dated July 15, … suggests that the arts group is in such grave financial straits that neither the legislated cash infusion from the state nor the reduced expense of a shortened season might be enough to save it.” – The Baltimore Sun
Louvre Removes Sackler Name From Its Walls
The move follows a widely publicized protest PAIN Sackler held together with the French group Aides Paris outside the Louvre. On July 1, the activists gathered outside the museum’s central pyramid to demand the removal of the Sackler name from 12 rooms in the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities, previously named the Cour Carrée Wing of Antiquities. – Hyperallergic
Recent Listening In Brief
Bob Sheppard, The Fine Line (Challenge)
The veteran saxophonist/flutist’s career as a collaborator and L.A. film and TV musicians may account for his not having achieved greater fan recognition. This album could change that. – Doug Ramsey
Report: Notre Dame Was Much Closer To Collapsing Than Has Been Reported
Some of what went wrong that night has been reported in the French news media, including Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaîné. Now, The New York Times has conducted scores of interviews and reviewed hundreds of documents to reconstruct the missteps and how Notre-Dame was saved in the first four critical hours. – The New York Times
Drawing a Line
“We work at StageSource, which represents both the individual theatre artists and the theatrical organizations of New England. Part of our mission is to provide resources to empower our community to realize its greatest potential — and for us, that potential is impossible to reach without a definitively safe and inclusive environment. … [To that end, we created] the Line Drawn Initiative to address sexual harassment in the New England theatre sector. Through that initiative, we released a survey to uncover the scope and specifics of the problem. Unsurprisingly, the results were bleak.” – HowlRound