Category: issues

“As many as 44% of fundraisers fell in the profession by accident, with only 5% gravitating to fundraising as an intentional career choice. … We wouldn’t, for example, find a surgeon, accountant or lawyer who said they had got into their role by accident. All those roles would require a set period of study, with key milestones for passing training and competency-based testing. Yet in careers such as fundraising, there is no such pathway.” – Arts Professional

Mark E. Siddall, an invertebrate zoologist whose expertise is in leeches, “was fired this month … after the museum found that he had sexually harassed and bullied a graduate student who was doing research under his supervision.” – The New York Times

“Plans were announced over summer for something approaching a full season of opera and ballet across its three stages, and on 6 September, the theatre started the season with an all-star cast performing Verdi’s Don Carlo” — which was canceled after two performances because two of those stars contracted COVID. “‘Said the Bolshoi’s general director, Vladimir Urin, ‘Unfortunately, in the current situation, it can become part of our everyday lives that at short notice we can no longer put things on.’ He said the theatre was working to ensure there were always understudies available to avoid cancellations happening too often.” – The Guardian

“On Oct. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court holds an oral argument in Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc., the most important copyright case in decades. It’ll now happen without the high court’s most fervently pro-copyright voice.” – The Hollywood Reporter

California tried to legislate digital privacy, but it was a rushed legislative process, and the massive loopholes left during that process haven’t been fixed. But can a ballot initiative, Prop 24, fix them? Some say nope. “Privacy advocates resisting a privacy initiative is less intuitive.” – Wired

Actually, it’s already here: “We found a sprawling web of nonexistent authors turning Russian-government talking points into thousands of opinion pieces and placing them in sympathetic Western publications, with crowds of fake people discussing the same themes on Twitter.” – The Atlantic

Early Sunday morning, U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco said in an order that the Commerce Department’s prohibitions against the popular Chinese messaging app “burden substantially more speech than is necessary to serve the government’s significant interest in national security, especially given the lack of substitute channels for communication.” – Reuters

It’s getting harder and harder. “As the tools for online media evolve faster than the public’s visual and media literacy, this was bound to happen.” – Hyperallergic

“If we read, for example, that the arts are ‘crucial to reducing poor health and inequality’ as claimed in a press release from University College London on the release of the WHO report, our critical antennae should begin to vibrate. We all know that the major social determinant of poor health is poverty, and that decent food, housing, education and employment are the crucially important determinants of health. Can we really regard the arts as being ‘crucial’?” – ArtsProfessional

As museums, Hagia Sophia and Chora embodied both Byzantine and Ottoman pasts, and became symbols of multi-faith co-existence. Their conversion implies a hierarchy prioritising their Islamic past over all other layers. – The Conversation