Comedy poses a threat to sovereign power not only because of its anarchic bent, but because it makes light of such momentous matters as suffering and death, hence diminishing the force of some of the judicial sanctions that governing classes tend to keep up their sleeve. – Commonweal
Tag: 05.06.19
Onstage (And Partly Under It) With A Metropolitan Opera Prompter
“Before each performance Carol Isaac climbs into her little box from the orchestra pit and raises her seat just enough to be seen by the singers but not the audience.” It’s tight quarters in there, especially for a six-hour Wagner opera. But she and her seven colleagues in the job at the Met love the work. And the singers love them. (includes video) – NY1 (New York City)
Adam Gopnik Tries To Explain Liberalism (It Doesn’t Go Well)
“The imaginative locus of Gopnik’s liberalism is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. It is the liberalism of the Enlightenment café, of the bourgeois-bohemian bedrooms of nineteenth-century political theorists—what you would get if you crossed John Stuart Mill’s and George Eliot’s sex lives with Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of rational communication.” – The New Republic
Amazon Is Offering To Pay New York Times, BuzzFeed, New York Magazine To Expand Abroad
The online-shopping juggernaut is reportedly in talks with those three outlets (and possibly others) “about deals that would reward them for expanding their international presence, specifically in consumer-oriented shopping sites” such as NYT’s Wirecutter and New York Media’s Strategist. – Vox
Sure, Barnes And Noble Can Countersue Its Former CEO, Rules Judge — If They Pay His Lawyers In Advance
The ousted chief of the chain, Demos Parneros, sued over his dismissal (as one does if one is a CEO), so B&N decided to countersue, demanding to claw back some of the CEO’s compensation and to be awarded damages for his behavior. The judge let the countersuit proceed, but ruled that the indemnity clause in Parneros’s contract applies even in this case. – Publishers Weekly
George Soros’s Foundation Starts Up New Arts Fellowships
“Soros Arts Fellowship [is] an initiative to support innovative mid-career artists using art and public space to advance ‘pluralistic, democratic, and just societies.’ The eight fellows received an $80,000 stipend to realize an ‘ambitious socially engaged art project’ over the following 18 months.” – Inside Philanthropy
Are Companies Like Facebook and Twitter Platforms Or Publishers? It Really Matters
If they’re platforms, they don’t have legal responsibility for the content carried on their sites. If publishers, then they’re legally liable. Fair enough. But the companies are muddying the distinctions, claiming to be both and neither. And that’s creating problems. – Vox
Google’s New AI App Generates Poetry
“The idea behind the app” — PoemPortraits — “which was jointly conceived by artist and stage designer Es Devlin and the creative technologist Ross Goodwin, is for users to ‘donate’ a single word to an ongoing, collective poem. The word you enter will be integrated in a randomly, or rather, algorithmically-produced couplet based on a scanning of more than 20 million words of 19th-century poetry.” – Literary Hub
What Alan Turing Warned About Our Digital Future
Our digital beings are taking us apart. Pluralism is about holding ourselves together: various mental styles interact unpredictably within us, allowing for unpredictable contact with other thinking beings. Truthtelling B is helpless without the communication of chimerical A and the analysis of stern C. Without honest B, shapeshifting A will retreat to decadence with C, producing a digital tyranny that kills democracy and the planet. – New York Review of Books
All Of The Earth Has Been Transformed By Humans. It’s A Scary Power
“In this newly designated ‘human age’, our species’ impact on the oceans, the land and the atmosphere has become an inescapable feature of the Earth. This idea that humanity has forced a geological transition is capturing people’s attention not just because changes in epochs are rare. It is attracting notice because our species is gripped by the idea that we possess planetary powers.” – Aeon