Says artist Olayami Dabls, founder of Detroit’s MBAD African Bead Museum, “I decided that I would open up an African Bead Museum, specially learning that the beads embodied the culture and the history of the people. And that’s something that was missing in the history of Africans in this country.” The museum is located in one of Detroit’s most distressed neighborhoods, and for two decades has provided something else that was missing, stability. (video) – PBS NewsHour
‘Angels’ In East Texas: How Tony Kushner’s Play Tore Apart, And Then Changed, A Small Southern Town
In 1999, a small college in Kilgore, TX — in an area where, at the time, gay men were routinely beaten and sometimes murdered — staged Angels in America, angry protests from local fundamentalists led to a showdown that attracted national media attention. Wes Ferguson, who edited the college paper at the time and whose sensationalist headline on a preview story ignited the fury, recounts how it went down and talks to some of the key participants about how they, and the town, were changed by the furor 20 years ago. – Texas Monthly
36 Pieces Of Computer Code That Changed The World
“We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV — pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don’t sit around compiling lists of the world’s most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much. So Slate decided to do precisely that. … The editors polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. They were asked to pick: Which pieces of code had a huge influence? Which ones warped our lives?” – Slate
What The Wild Success Of Silicon Valley Says About The American Success Story
The question of fixing Silicon Valley is inseparable from the question of fixing the system of postwar American capitalism, of which it is perhaps the purest expression. Some believe that the problems we see are bugs that might be fixed with a patch. Others think the code is so bad at its core that a radical rewrite is the only answer. – The Nation
Jane Austen Lovers Are Furious At The New Ending To Her Unfinished Novel
“Andrew Davies’ TV adaptation of Sanditon, which aired on Sunday, ended with Charlotte and Sidney bidding each other a tearful farewell – in love, but not together. … The ending has enraged and upset viewers, but most of all, I think, surprised them. This is Austen, and we know what we’re entitled to: there’s even a book about it, for goodness’ sake – The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After.” – The Guardian
Netflix And Director Ava DuVernay Sued For Defamation By — Wait, Who?
In the 1940s, John E. Reid and Associates developed a commonly-used, and now-controversial police interrogation method called the Reid Technique. That method is mentioned once, briefly, in When They See Us, DuVernay’s recent Netflix series about the Central Park Five; based on that mention, Reid and Associates argues in its court filing that its reputation has been damaged by the script’s mischaracterization and false assertions. – Variety
World’s Biggest Movie-Theater Chain Moves Into Streaming Video
“[AMC Entertainment’s new] service, AMC Theaters On Demand, will offer about 2,000 films for sale or rent after their theatrical runs, just as iTunes, Amazon and other video-on-demand retailers do.” – The New York Times
Museums Are Finally Paying Real Attention To The Needs Of Visitors With Disabilities
Well, some of them are. Reporter Claire Voon looks at some museums who are doing well in this area (the new MoMA) and some that have a way to go. – Artsy
Harold Bloom, Bestselling And Controversial Literary Critic, Dead At 89
“From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called ‘the School of Resentment,’ by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.” – The New York Times
Musician John Cohen Of New Lost City Ramblers Dead At 87
“[He] was distinguished in at least three fields. As a photographer in the 1950s and ’60s he made memorable images of contemporary American writers and painters, and of the young Bob Dylan soon after the singer’s arrival in New York. As a film-making musicologist he documented traditional arts in the American South and in Peru. And as a musician, particularly as a founder member of the New Lost City Ramblers, he had an incalculable influence on the American folk revival and all that followed.” – The Guardian
For First Time In 27 Years, And Despite The Rules, Booker Prize Is Shared By Two Titles
Yes, one of them is Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments; the other is Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Over more than five hours of debate, the judges were told repeatedly that splitting the prize was not permitted, so the panel unanimously made the decision “to flout the rules.” – The Guardian
MoMA’s Opportunity To Tell New Stories
Peter Schjeldahl: “The renovation is a big deal for the global art world, and certainly for New York. It runs up against problems old and new. Generously enlarged quarters will only marginally relieve a chronic crush of visitors, the museum victimized by its own charisma. Enhanced representations of art by women, African-Americans, Africans, Latin-Americans, and Asians can feel tentative, pitched between self-evident justice and noblesse oblige. But such efforts are important and must continue. We will have a diverse cosmopolitan culture or none worth bothering about.” – The New Yorker
Boris Johnson’s Government Proposes £250 Million In Culture Infrastructure Support
The bulk of the new fund is being directed towards “major infrastructure and maintenance work at local and regional museums” and capital and technology upgrades at public libraries. – Arts Professional
Streaming Wars: Challenging The Binge-TV Model
“Having had roughly six years to figure out how to best attract TV viewers trained to feast on content, none of the streaming services set to debut between now and next spring will be exclusively adopting the binge model, and veterans like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have tried different release strategies themselves.” – Los Angeles Times
Books that made me
Clive James recently filled out the Guardian’s “Books That Made Me” questionnaire. I was so struck by his answers — as well as the questions themselves — that I decided to play along. – Terry Teachout
Why Theatre In Los Angeles Is Missing Its Potential
Charles McNulty: “What is the distinctive stamp of L.A. theater? In posing this question to myself, I find my answer to be dismayingly similar to what I would have said when I moved to Los Angeles from New York 14 years ago to be The Times’ theater critic. The theater has remained decentralized, widely variable in quality and ambition, and sorely in need of institutional leadership able to meet the self-regard of a city that, long out of New York’s shadow, has come to recognize itself as a global metropolis.” – Los Angeles Times
“Fortnite” Season Ten Ends In Destruction: Video Games (And Storytelling) Will Never Be The Same Again
In the game’s final moments on Sunday evening, a giant explosion took place, sucking the world into a black vortex, leaving players stunned and confused. Brilliantly, Epic took the explosion out of the “fiction” of the game, so that the menu pages and user interface were also pulled into the black hole. – The Guardian
A Crash Course In Hitler Satire
Taika Waititi’s new movie Jojo Rabbit is far from the first movie to satirize the genocidal leader. But many people object to the movie on pure concept. “Is it right to make comedy of a man who did such transcendently horrible things?” – Slate
A.I. Software Is Learning To Write Prose — Could It Get Good Enough To Write A ‘New Yorker’ Piece?
John Seabrook does a deep dive into how artificial intelligence programs learn the rules of English grammar and syntax and teach themselves how to predict what you, at the keyboard, might write next — and even, eventually, to write the way you do. Then he and a computer scientist feed a program the entire New Yorker nonfiction archive as a dataset to learn from, and they ask it to try, based on the opening, to complete a real New Yorker article. – The New Yorker