On pretending to be a bogus Israeli anti-terrorism expert for his film Who Is America?: “The character creation is a reverse character creation. You have to think, Okay, we got Dick Cheney, he’s agreed to do this. How am I going to convince one of the most cynical, suspicious, brilliant minds that I’m real? How am I going to get him to say things he’s ultimately going to regret? That becomes the process of fully learning your character and making sure there are no holes in your character.” – Vulture
Can The CEO Who Saved Waterstones Save Barnes & Noble, Too?
The hedge fund that bought the beleaguered Barnes & Noble last week also owns Waterstones, the UK’s leading bookstore chain, which had been suffering from similar troubles. So the new owners are sending over to B&N the man who led Waterstones back to profitability, James Daunt. Can he revive the U.S. chain? “I have done it before,” he says, “the scale is a lot bigger, but so are the resources available.” – Publishers Weekly
How iTunes Saved The Music Business
Music played an outsize role in the evolution of the internet. As Larry Lessig put in Free Culture: “Filesharing music was the crack cocaine of the internet’s growth. It drove demand for access to the internet more powerfully than any other single application.” Jobs became the first licensed dealer in that drug and iTunes provided the saddle that enabled Apple to ride the tiger. – The Guardian
The Iraq Museum, Once Looted And Then Partly Restored, Has Antiquities And Art That Can’t Be Found Elsewhere
The museum lost about 15,000 items – but its collection is huge, luminous, and important. “Art historians and archaeologists know how exceptional the collection is. But despite Baghdad’s relative safety today, neither the city nor the museum have yet to become a major destination for Iraqis, much less foreign tourists.” – The New York Times
Can Britain’s National Portrait Gallery Cut Its Ties To British Petroleum?
It doesn’t seem entirely likely, but artists, activists, and even a judge have asked the museum to try. “They accuse the central London gallery of helping to launder the oil industry’s image through its BP sponsorship deal and say the oil company is aggravating the climate crisis by extracting fossil fuels.” – The Guardian (UK)
Doublethink, And Doublespeak, Are Stronger Than Orwell Believed
Returning to the book itself is something of a tonic against despair, but: “We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment.” And we chose it ourselves. – The Atlantic
Learning About What Theatre Artists Can Offer To Veterans – And, Of Course, What Vets Offer Artists
The Telling Project works with veterans and their families to create devised work all over the country. How does that work, really? “We are using our decades of training as artists to translate the experiences of veterans and their families into narratives, and then to translate the narratives into performances. Another way to put it is that we are helping these folks with meaning,” says founder and director Jonathan Wei. – HowlRound
The Director Of ‘Hadestown’ Won A Tony And Ripped Into The Reasons She’s The Only Woman Directing On Broadway This Year
It has nothing to do with who is ready to direct, Rachel Chavkin said. “There are so many women who are ready to go. There are so many artists of color who are ready to go. … This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be.” – The New York Times
Who Cleaned Up At The Tonys? The Complete List
Basically, Hadestown. Sure, it didn’t win all 14 awards it was nominated for, but eight’s not bad. – The New York Times
Dear iTunes, Thanks For Saving The Music Industry From Itself
In 2001, the music industry “faced an existential threat” because its “vanquishing of Napster turned out to be a pyrrhic victory: the genie had escaped from the bottle. Dozens of filesharing systems had come into being.” iTunes (even though it’s now bloated and terrible and leaving) “was a revelation,” and made paying for music online a norm. – The Guardian (UK)
The Only Good TV Shows Now Understand Restraint, Not Endless Streaming Expansion
Just take a look at Shrill or Fleabag versus, oh, Game of Thrones, or Chernobyl. “Over time, length came to be correlated with quality, and with TV auteurs who declined to have their genius constrained by such arbitrary forces as ‘formats’ or ‘editors.'” Now the backlash has begun. – The Atlantic
YouTube Spends A Week Bungling Announcements, Making Harassment Worse
Reading the history of this week of YouTube announcements, discussions, demonetizing of right-wing accounts, and the subsequent high-profile, high-volume, high-intensity harassment campaign against Vox journalist Carlos Maza, well … “In short, YouTube’s big policy announcement ended up acting as incitement to harassment against one of its own creators.” – Vice
The Comedians Confronting Darkness And Mortality
Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph are two of the funniest stars out there, but on Russian Doll and Forever, they’re forced to put that humor to use in the middle of some pretty intense situations. Lyonne has a serious theory about Rudolph’s ability to move back and forth: “Because of SNL and, first, The Groundlings, that there’s a deep training ground in there that’s very real. You give them what’s really a very formal education: Under all conditions, the highest of stakes, at the most pressure in the world, deliver.” – Variety
A Preference For Part-Time
“A survey from the Pew Research Center in 2016 found that, among US workers employed part-time, 64 per cent prefer it that way. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of full-time workers – that’s almost 26 million Americans – would rather work part-time.” – Aeon