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Mort Sahl, Who Created Political Comedy As We Know It, Dead At 94

He became famous for walking to the microphone with a newspaper and riffing on whatever stories he found there. (Time magazine called him "Will Rogers with fangs.") As actor-filmmaker Albert Brooks put it, "Every comedian who is not doing wife jokes has to thank him for that." - AP

Why It’s So Important To Figure Out Who Gets To Own Our Data

Our problem today lies in finding a model of data ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, that avoids the profound costs of free-wheeling private exploitation by individual firms, and that does not slip into authoritarian state control. - Boston Review

She Saved Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center And Merged It With The Philadelphia Orchestra. Now She’s Retiring

When Anne Ewers arrived in 2007, the Kimmel still had $30 million in construction debt. She raised money to pay it off, increased revenue (more Broadway shows, fewer touring orchestras), and oversaw the merger that ended conflicts between the Kimmel and its largest tenant. - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Astonishing Growth In University Endowments Last Year — What To Do With It?

Washington University in St. Louis saw a 65 percent return. Duke, 56 percent. MIT, 55.5 percent (after completing a $6 billion capital campaign). Brown, 51.5 percent. Dartmouth, 46.5 percent. Yale, 40.2 percent. - Inside Higher Ed

Broadway Shows, With The Advantage Of Time Off And Protests, Have Quietly Made Changes

Many changes came about because actors requested some rethinking of words, lyrics, or choreography. Sally Hemings, for instance, no longer flirt-dances with Jefferson in Hamilton's "What Did I Miss?" - The New York Times

Alec Baldwin, Firing Prop Gun On Set, Kills Cinematographer And Wounds Director

While filming a scene on location near Santa Fe for the feature Rust, which he co-wrote, is producing and stars in, Baldwin discharged a prop pistol loaded with blanks and hit director of photography Halyna Hutchins, now dead, and director Joel Souza, hospitalized. - Santa Fe New Mexican

Bernard Haitink, Revered Conductor, Dead At 92

Known especially for his Mahler and Bruckner, Haitink had long tenures at the helm of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, Royal Opera in London, and Glyndebourne Festival and spent periods as (unofficially but in effect) interim chief conductor at the Boston And Chicago Symphonies. - BBC

Disgraced During #MeToo, Garrison Keillor Tries For A Comeback

Five years after he retired from A Prairie Home Companion, four years after accusations led public radio and publishers to drop him, Keillor is self-publishing and doing speaking gigs before forgiving audiences. He has no regrets, but his account of things is, well, sanitized. - MSN (The Washington Post)

Black Americans Should Absolutely Appropriate European Opera (Though Not Necessarily Like This): John McWhorter

Writes the Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist of Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones and William Grant Still's Highway 1, U.S.A., "the tradition being appropriated here is based on a philosophy of composition and audience reception hardly inevitable." - The New York Times

Report: One-Third Of UK Music Jobs Were Lost During Pandemic

The research said there were 69,000 fewer jobs in music in 2020 than in 2019 - a drop of 35% - due to the "devastating impact" of coronavirus. - BBC

The Mind-Boggling History That Shapes South Korea’s Popular Cultural Exports

Think about it: Parasite and Squid Game are pretty weird: intense drama, occasional shocking violence and dark satire jumbled with juvenile humor and an almost childish innocence. What does this strange mishmash come from? The difficult, disorienting past hundred years South Korea has lived through. - The American Scholar

The Existential Dangers Of “Longtermism”

Longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today. - Aeon

WBEZ And The Chicago Sun-Times: Can Public Radio Really Rescue Print Journalism?

"Similar mergers and acquisitions have become a common way to bolster the struggling print industry, but if radio were to take on a major newspaper, that would be a first." - The Verge

Culture Shift? America’s Workers Grab Control

In unionized industries, this takes the form of collective bargaining and, where necessary, voting for strikes. In non-unionized industries, which make up the vast bulk of the American economy, it shows up in workers leaving their jobs and looking for higher-paying ones. - The New Yorker

An Alternative History About The Dawn Of Humans

Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring. - The Atlantic

Vienna’s Museums Now Have An Onlyfans Site To Promote The Nudes In Their Collections

Why? Because Facebook, Instagram and TikTok keep taking down their nude artworks — Peter Paul Rubens, Egon Schiele, even the Venus of Willendorf — for violating obscenity rules. - ARTnews

Deepfakes — The End Of Truth?

Like most digital technologies, the quality of deepfakes is increasing at an alarming rate, and it is clear that even the most complex deepfake tools will be as easy to use as Instagram filters in the very near future. - Shelly Palmer

The New Activism: Art Attacking The Institutions — Any Institution, Including Those Who Show The Art

One irony of contemporary art that critiques or transcends the institution is just how central the institution remains to it. Indeed, the complexity of the art ecosystem as a reflection of global power is at the heart of Forensic Architecture’s origin story. - The New York Times

John McWhorter On Campus Culture And The Bright Sheng Case: Radicalism Or Progressivism?

It's not "the students’ fragility, it’s that their approach illustrates the difference between radicalism and progressivism. It’s an example of a strain of thought permeating campuses, one that blithely elides that difference in favor of preaching only “social justice.” - The New York Times

Is The Line Between Inspiration And Appropriation Clear, Or Sometimes A Bit Fuzzy?

"People in power have always had a way of working nuance to their advantage. If consent is also nuanced, are we ready to admit that creativity and power go hand in hand?" - Hyperallergic
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