Prairie Home Companion to Continue Experimenting With Guest Hosts

“[Garrison] Keillor has been talking about the future of A Prairie Home Companion for some time. At 68 he says there are other things he’d like to do, but he feels a responsibility to the show. ‘It was the result of the hard work of a lot of people and I don’t think I should let it go into dry dock just because the captain gets old. There are other captains,’ he said.”

A New Art Gallery Way Out on the Edge – in Tasmania

“Next week MONA, the $80-million [Aus] private museum and ideological playground of Hobart-born David Walsh, will finally open to the public, two years overdue. … Walsh is a self-made millionaire … beholden to nobody, which leaves him free to present art and ideas that public institutions or private museum owners with more polite tastes would not dare touch.”

Open Source, Theoretically Speaking

“At least theoretically, open source could also resolve the main dilemma that bedevils innovation policy. On the one hand, most inventors need incentives to keep inventing. On the other, the social value of an invention is maximised if anyone–not just those willing to pay for it–can use it. Open source seems to satisfy both conditions.”

British Films Are Good. So Why Isn’t The British Film Industry?

“While the U.K. has a long cinematic tradition, world-class facilities and a glut of homegrown talent, it has yet to develop a self-sustaining domestic film industry. Instead, the sector relies on grants, lottery funding and the investment of Hollywood studios that choose to shoot in the U.K., lured by a tax break worth about £100m a year.”

Reinventing Pop Music – But Not Yet Sure How To Talk About It

“Great music is now constantly becoming available in ways that force us to reconsider what we’re hearing, and how we listen. For half a century, musicians and fans have congregated along two poles: the album and the single. The problem is, we still haven’t devised a language to describe the increasingly vibrant area between the two poles of the studio album and the hit single.”