“Inkitt is marketed as ‘the world’s first data-driven publisher’. The company has built an artificially intelligent algorithm that analyses users’ reading patterns to predict future bestsellers. Once a future bestseller is found, Inkitt works with publishing houses to get these novels to print.”
Tag: 03.15.16
Museums, And Maybe Audiences, Are Still Worried About Robert Mapplethorpe
“Twenty-five years after a landmark trial over exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, the debate about what can be shown in museums has shifted — but has not completely disappeared.”
Actual Spies Tell What Is And Isn’t Realistic In ‘The Americans’
“Real spies know that world is make-believe. Still, when they’re done lurking in shadows – or typing away in their cubicles, more likely – they often come home and turn on the show … Spies recognize that the show exaggerates, but they also mostly praise the ways in which it rings true – and even the ways it doesn’t.”
It All Comes Down To The Face: Ta-Nehisi Coates On The Controversy Over Casting The Nina Simone Biopic
“It’s equally difficult to ignore the fact that, while it is hard for all women in Hollywood, it is particularly hard for black women, and even harder for black women who share the dark skin, broad nose and full lips of Nina Simone.”
Martin Charnin Is Still Directing ‘Annie’, Four Decades After Its Premiere
“The fun of it for me is that every time I do it, I learn something new about it, and in theory every production that precedes the one I’m doing makes the one I’m doing the beneficiary of the stuff that I’ve learned. So it keeps growing, it keeps changing.” (includes memories of being in the original West Side Story)
‘She Was Less Like A Recluse, More Like A Bomb Going Off’ – The Real Emily Dickinson
“She was promiscuous in her own fashion, deceiving everyone around her with the sly masks she wore. She was faithful to no one but her dog. Her white dress was one more bit of camouflage, to safeguard the witchery of her craft. … Cotton Mather would have burned her for a witch.”
Top Ten UK Attractions Last Year Were All In London (Despite Big Drop In Tate Attendance)
Visitor numbers at Tate Modern fell by more than 1 million in 2015 to 4.7 million – the lowest since 2005. The steep decline represents a 19% fall compared with the previous year. It reverses attendance figures for 2014, when Tate Modern’s visitor numbers grew by 1 million to reach a record-breaking 5.8 million, due in part to the success of the exhibition ‘Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs’.
Russia’s Deputy Culture Minister Arrested, Charged With Embezzlement
“Russia’s deputy culture minister Grigory Pirumov has been detained on embezzlement charges, Russian state media reported on 15 March. Earlier in the day, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that several high-ranking culture ministry officials and businessmen were under investigation for allegedly ’embezzling state funds allocated for restoration work on cultural heritage sites’.”
Critics’ Poll Names Top 30 LGBT Films Of All Time
Perhaps predictably, only two of the top ten come from before 1990 (and one of those was 1985); the top two were released in the last five years. Yet the oldest movie on the list goes all the way back to Weimar-era Germany.
The Vatican Tried To Keep This Gay Romance Out Of Italian Cinemas – And Of Course It Backfired
The Italian Conference of Bishops’ Film Evaluation Commission ruled that the film is “not advised, unusable and scabrous (indecent or salacious)” – and since the Church owns most of Italy’s art-house theaters, that was a problem. Yet the movie – which is no. 2 on the list of greatest LGBT films, by the way – was the country’s top earner per screen last weekend, taking 50% more than the runner-up.