Tag: 01.10.16

Submit Like A Man: Female Playwright Will Spend A Year Resubmitting Scripts Under A Male Pseudonym

Mya Kagan: “Over the past few years, I have been increasingly disheartened by the statistics on women in theatre and TV. The exact number varies from study to study, but they all come in around 20 percent. … With all these numbers reminding me that my industry sees and treats me as inferior to my male counterpart, I started wondering … would I have been more successful if people straight-up thought I was a dude?”

Are There Any Unforgivable Sins In Literature?

Rivka Galchen: “For me, the unforgivable sin in literature is the same as that in life: the assumption of certainty and the moral high ground.”
Benjamin Moser: “The Nazis proved that perverted words can, in fact, lead to the destruction of society. … To use words to serve the cause of human unfreedom is grotesque, like a physician serving torturers.”

And Now, A Rant About How Our Culture Has Dumbed Down (And The Consequences)

“The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world—history, theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy, literature, religion and the arts—have been corrupted or relegated to the margins.”

How An American Magazine Editor Accidentally Became A Leading Russian Screenwriter

Michael Idov, former editor of the Russian version of GQ: “I don’t have a good answer for how I got here. Not only have I blindly managed to write Russia’s most popular feature film and one of its most-talked-about TV series of the year, but I managed to do it in 2015, when relations between the United States and Russia were at their coldest point since [the 1960s].”

That Time When Art Collecting Wasn’t So Completely About Money

“In an age of growing income inequality, the excesses of today’s art market are, for some, beginning to grate. In October, Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern in London, wrote in The Art Newspaper that there was a conflict between ‘those who treat art as a private good — from which to profit’ and those who participate in art as a ‘collective process and common endeavor, based on inclusion and access.'”

When You Want To Be Transgressive But You Also Want People To Like You

“If you look at American pop culture, the only well-loved book where a married mom commits infidelity is ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ — and it begins when she’s several decades dead, conveniently dead, and she did it for four days and then went back to her marriage. The guy wrote her these letters, and she just returned them. Why? Leave the farm! No one cares! The kids are up and out, your husband is into weighing heifers. Go to Spain, order off the tapas menu!”