“Over the last few years, [Kevin Jones and Lesli Mones, co-founders of The August Wilson Red Door Project, and retired Portland Police Bureau deputy chief Robert Day] have formed an unusual partnership to spark new conversations and ways of thinking about race relations in Portland. And they’re using the stage to help bridge the divide.” – PBS NewsHour
A Linguist Makes The Case For The Use(fulness) Of The Word ‘Like’
Language acquisition professor Rebecca Woods assembled what linguists call a corpus (“a representative sample of language as used by certain speakers”) from a BBC show (the makeup competition Glow Up) that’s regularly complained about for its young participants’ constant use of like. Studying this corpus, she found that the word isn’t just filler: it’s actually governed by a sort of grammar and serves a real purpose. – The Conversation
A Young Breakdancer From Provincial Russia Dreams Of Olympic Gold
Sergey Chernyshev, 18, began learning breakdancing from his father, also named Sergey, who picked it up from VHS tapes that made it into newly de-Sovietized Russia in the 1990s. “In many ways, the story of the Chernyshevs … is the story of break dancing over the past three decades, with its unlikely journey from the streets of New York to every corner of the globe and to its surprising inclusion, pending a final vote in December, in the Olympics.” – The New York Times
Near-Total Sweep For Women At The Hugo Awards
Okay, they didn’t win every single prize there was at the annual honors for science fiction (men won for the best film and television scripts, for instance), but female creators took home the awards for best novel, novella, novelette, short story, graphic story, fan fiction, fanzine, fancast, and fan art. Not bad for a genre that was considered more or less closed to most women not so long ago. – The Verge
Why Is Joe Rogan One Of The Most Popular Podcasters In America? Guys, And What He Gets About Them
“Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. … So many people in the content business right now are trying, and failing, to get the attention of these men, and yet somehow Joe Rogan has managed to recruit a following the size of Florida.” Devin Gordon does a deep dive into Rogan’s gut appeal, what’s powerful about it, and what’s unsettling. – The Atlantic
A Giant Hand With A Glowering Face Is Freaking Out New Zealand’s Capital
The 16½-foot-tall sculpture, titled Quasi and perched on top of City Gallery Wellington to glare at passersby, was sent up from Christchurch by its creator, artist Ronnie van Hout — and Wellingtonians are describing it with such phrases as “nightmarish fever dream” and “some hideous malevolent being.” It will be there for three years. – The Guardian
Silicon Valley: What If We’re Not Making The World A Better Place?
For a long time, the prevailing posture of the Silicon Valley élite was smugness bordering on hubris. Now the emotional repertoire is expanding to include shame—or, at least, the appearance of shame. – The New Yorker
‘Queer Eye’ Is Trying To Make Shopping, Redecorating, And Consuming Luxury Goods Into Spiritual Self-Improvement
Amanda Hess: “As its gurus lead the men (and occasionally, women) in dabbing on eye cream, selecting West Elm furniture, preparing squid-ink risotto and acquiring gym memberships, they are building the metaphorical framework for an internal transformation. Their salves penetrate the skin barrier to soothe loneliness, anxiety, depression, grief, low self-esteem, absentee parenting and hoarding tendencies. The makeover is styled as an almost spiritual conversion. It’s the meaning of life as divined through upgraded consumer choices.” – The New York Times
The Anthropologists Who Thought They Could End Racism, Sexism
Franz Boas concluded that “there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring to ‘cultures,’ in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead.” – The New Yorker
UK Museum Attendance Up Six Percent After A Couple Down Years
Attendance dropped by 1% in both 2017 and 2016, and by 0.5% in 2015. But new figures from the national tourism agency show a decisive turnaround, with attendance across 444 museums and art galleries growing by 6% on the previous year. – Arts Professional
Why Was This UK Museum Using Facial Recognition On Its Visitors?
A spokeswoman for National Museums Liverpool defended its use of the enhanced surveillance technology as an additional security measure for the exhibition, titled “China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors,” which ran from February to the end of October last year. The technology was used on the advice of the local police and not at the request of the Chinese lenders, artnet News understands. – artnet
Robert De Niro’s Company Sues Former Exec For $6 Million
Until April (when she left amid worries about “corporate sabotage”), Chase Robinson was “vice president of production and finance’ at De Niro’s Canal Productions, drawing a $300,000 salary. Canal’s suit accuses Robinson of embezzling cash, using corporate credit cards for lavish spending on hotels and meals, taking personal trips using De Niro’s frequent flyer miles — and, on top of it all, rarely coming to work and spending what time she was in the office binge-watching Netflix. – Variety
Lynn Nottage On Staying Political
Nottage is the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: for Sweat and Ruined. The former reached Broadway, while the latter – a story about women in war-torn Congo – played a sustained Off-Broadway run. As a result of where they were first staged, the plays have had somewhat different lives after their New York engagements. – The Stage
What, Exactly, Is A Museum? International Council Of Museums Is Having A Bitter Fight Over That Question
“On 12 August, 24 national branches [of ICOM] — including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with five museums’ international committees — requested the postponement of a vote on a revised definition of museums.” Said one veteran art journalist of the proposed revision, “At first, I thought this was a joke”; the chair of the International Committee of Museology maintains that not even the Louvre would qualify as a museum under the proposed revision. – The Art Newspaper
San Francisco’s Commercial Theatre Titans Settle Years-Long Legal Battle
“By terms of a settlement announced Monday, Aug. 19, [Carole] Shorenstein Hays will give up her half ownership of SHN, operator of the Orpheum and Golden Gate Theatre. [She] will retain her ownership of the Curran as a separate entity. [Hays and former business partner Robert Nederlander] are now free to compete for Broadway productions, a sticking point to their prior arrangement that had led to years of costly lawsuits over noncompete clauses between the theaters.” – San Francisco Chronicle
London’s National Theatre Says 35 Percent Of Its Plays By Living Writers Were By Women Last Season
This figure is still 15% short of the NT’s stated 50/50 target for gender representation, which the theatre has said it will achieve by 2021. It is also below the 42% figure recorded in 2016/17. However, the theatre argued that it is still “on course” to meet its targets. – The Stage
At What Point Is A Dance Move Cultural Appropriation?
“People think that all you have to do is have certain postures, wear certain clothes, dance to certain music” to make it hip hop, Michele Byrd-McPhee says, pointing out that simply donning toe shoes and tutus and dancing to Tchaikovsky does not a ballerina make. “It’s that kind of disconnect from the origins of the culture and the people who created it that’s problematic.” – Dance Magazine
Martha Over the Years
When Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, stepped through Jacob’s Pillow’s front curtain to introduce the group’s performance, she mentioned that this was the 94th year of the MGDC, which made it the oldest dance company in the United States. – Deborah Jowitt
The Director Happily Tackling Six Hours Of Shaw
Kimberley Rampersad was a dancer who started to sense that dance jobs would dry up – and it was time to move into directing. Now, she’s got Man and Superman, all six hours of it, on her plate, thanks to her previous work – and to Mark Rylance. – The New York Times
An Author Won A Prize For Her Debut Novel, And She Split The Prize With The Other Nominees
Olivia Laing won a £10,000 prize for her novel Crudo over the weekend. But Laing said, in her acceptance speech, “Crudo was written against a kind of selfishness that’s everywhere in the world right now, against an era of walls and borders, winners and losers. Art doesn’t thrive like that and I don’t think people do either. We thrive on community, solidarity and mutual support and as such, and assuming this is agreeable to my fellow authors, I’d like the prize money to be split between us, to nourish as much new work as possible.” – The Guardian (UK)
Orwell Is Being Rewritten Into Newspeak (On Amazon)
Sure, some of this is funny – “One edition of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story referred to itself on the back cover as Animals Farm: A Fair Story. The preface referred to another great Orwell work, Homage to Catalonia, as Homepage to Catalonia – but overall, not so great (or funny). “Until recently, improving Orwell was not a practical business proposition. Then Amazon blew the doors off the heavily curated literary world.” – The New York Times