It has become a cesspool for scammers and con artists and crackpots of every kind. Worse, it even helps promote racist supremacist views. What can be done? – ProPublica
Tag: 04.07.20
33 Years Ago, This Novel About A Pandemic In 2020 Got A Lot Right
In 1987 Israeli science fiction writer Hamutal Shabtai wrote a book about a mysterious virus that engulfed the world in 2020. The scary part is that she got many of the details of what is now happening, right. – Ha’aretz
The University As Intellectual Factory (We’ve Been Warned)
The transformation of the university into a capital-intensive, bureaucratically organised enterprise was not simply an effect of academic specialisation. More than a century earlier, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant had observed how some universities had begun to function as factories and organise themselves around the division of intellectual labour. – Aeon
Broadway’s Obie Awards Go Virtual
The annual celebration of stage work was originally scheduled to be held at Terminal 5 in Manhattan on May 18. Instead it will be postponed until a later, as yet unannounced, date. In an interview with Variety, Heather Hitchens, president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing, one of the organizations behind the awards, said the show will include some form of performances, but cautioned that details are still being worked out. – Variety
Sad: Pictures Of The Demolition Of The Old LACMA
The work that began Monday focused on the museum’s 1965 Leo S. Bing Center, a 600-seat theater designed by architect William L. Pereira that has been used for film screenings, musical performances, talks and other events. Interior demolition of three other buildings — Pereira’s 1960 Hammer and Ahmanson buildings as well as Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates’ 1980s Art of the Americas building — is underway as well. – Los Angeles Times
Montreal’s Franglais Rap: Multi-Culti Creativity Or Threat To The Survival Of French In North America?
“To their legions of fans, the groups give voice to the bilingual vernacular of a multicultural city, marinated by its past French and British rulers, the forces of globalization and successive waves of immigration. … But they have also spawned a backlash in Quebec, … where critics have castigated them as self-colonizers who are ‘creolizing’ the French language and threatening its future.” – The New York Times
Fenway Park’s Organist Is Playing The Games Even Though Baseball Has Been Canceled
Normally, Josh Kantor is in a perch at Boston’s venerable baseball park, churning out tunes as the home team’s official organist. In late March, with the season put on pause due to coronavirus concerns, he decided he would try a single video stream from behind his Yamaha Electone and leave it at that. But the online response convinced him to come back the next day. And the next. Kantor is now pledging to continue the “7th-Inning Stretch,” as he calls his 30-minute show, until baseball returns or people get sick of it. – Washington Post
Archaeologists Open Egyptian Mummy’s Coffin And Discover 3,000-Year-Old Paintings Inside
At the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland, conservators working to preserve the remains of an ancient priestess or noblewoman named Ta-Kr-Hb opened her sarcophagus and found two paintings of a goddess in a red dress called Amentet. – Smithsonian Magazine
Say Goodbye To The Cleveland Plain Dealer As Owners Dismantle It
“The paper’s remaining staffers are now faced with a devastating decision: they can either leave and let the state’s largest paper, (and the country’s first News Guild), die, ceding victory at last to the Newhouses of Advance Publications who’ve been ruthlessly and methodically busting the PD’s union for years; or they can stay on, suffering the indignities of filing low-stakes stories on distant locales that haven’t been part of the paper’s regular coverage area for years.” – Cleveland Scene
Another Landmark Postmodern Dance Piece You Can Perform At Home
Last week it was one by Yvonne Rainer. This week it’s Trisha Brown’s 1971 Roof Piece, in which “dancers scattered themselves across the roofs of SoHo and played a dance version of the game Telephone.” Recently members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company got together on Zoom to do an adaptation they call Room/Roof Piece — and they recommend that you get some friends together and do the same. Here’s how. – The New York Times