Tag: 05.05.19

Brazil’s New Gov’t Redirects Culture Funding Away From Rio And São Paulo — Sharing The Wealth? Or Punishing Bolsonaro’s Enemies?

The maximum amount granted for a project has been slashed from $15 million to $250,000, which is a blow to the largest arts projects in the two metropolises, and the government says explicitly that it wants to spread funding to underrecognized artists and underserved regions of Brazil. (Some 90% of federal arts funding has been going to São Paul and Rio.) On the other hand, the arts communities of those two cities campaigned furiously against the election of President Bolsonaro, and many wonder if this is payback. – The Rio Times

How Belief Turned Into Opinion

‘The Reformation and Counter-Reformation participated in parallel projects of religious discipline: while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants disciplined populations of unbelievers.’ Belief in the modern sense of the word was bred of the resulting strain. The demands imposed on Christians by inquisitors and Puritans alike proved too much for many of them. Dissidents emerged in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, who emphasised the subjectivity of religious conviction. Belief was to become opinion. – History Today

The Dentist Who Collected His Way To Deep Expertise

Across the next six decades, on his dentist’s salary, he built a collection that made him what The Washington Post has called the world’s “pre-eminent private collector of Kollwitz.” The first print led to purchases of more than 650 works, many rare working proofs and drawings by her, and works by artists related to Kollwitz, including the social satirist George Grosz (1893–1959) and the proto-surrealist Max Klinger (1857–1920), among others. – The Forward

The Book-Review-Is-Dying Essay Is A Familiar Trope. Anything New To Report?

Is relentlessly sunny book “coverage” replacing honest book criticism, or merely supplementing it? Are listicles, Bookstagram, and literary Twitter nothing but treacly promotion puddles on the surfaces of which books can float unscrutinized and unchallenged; or are they in fact vibrant and necessary new arenas of discourse wherein previously silenced critical voices can finally be heard? Has the age of the algorithm truly killed the intellectually rigorous book review? – Bookmarks

Dr. Ruth At 90: How Little Karola Siegel Escaped The Holocaust And Became The Grandma Goddess Of The Sexual Revolution

“For a woman who, on arriving in New York, had worked as a housekeeper for $1 a day — and a woman who had taught herself English with the help of romance novels (‘because I always wanted to read to the end to know what happened’) — it [has been] a remarkable reversal. But it was also a logical one: There was a market for treatments of sex that prioritized truth over timidity. And there was, in an even broader sense, a need for those treatments.” – The Atlantic

Audio-Only Porn Becomes A Business (How Did This Not Happen Before Now?)

“These recordings — half-erotica, half-radio play — have long flourished on Reddit communities like GoneWildAudio or PillowTalkAudio. Now, entrepreneurs bet it can go mainstream — and make money. … Anyone looking for the classic tropes — for example, a pizza delivery boy’s romp with a bored housewife, or any sex that starts with ‘I’m sure we can figure out some form of payment’ — should look elsewhere.” – The Daily Beast

Find Yourself Reading Novels Less? Maybe It’s The Way You’re Reading Them…

“John Gardner, the literary critic, wrote that the job of the novelist is to create a ‘vivid and continuous dream’ for the reader, but I’d somehow developed a case of readerly sleep apnea. I’d gotten into the habit of consuming novels so fitfully that I was all but sealed off from their pleasures. It was as if I’d been watching movies in a special buffering-only mode, or listening to music through the world’s balkiest Bluetooth headphones. This style of reading had, I realized, shunted me into a vicious circle.” – The New York Times