Charles Reich, Author Of ‘The Greening Of America’, Dead At 91

“Reich was a popular Yale University professor whose students included both Bill and Hillary Clinton and a respected legal scholar when a 39,000-word excerpt from The Greening of America ran in The New Yorker in September 1970, generating a massive volume of letters. The book was published a few weeks later and sold more than 2 million copies, making Reich a middle-aged hero for a rebellious generation despite scorn from both conservatives and liberals.” – AP

An Oral History Of ‘Oh! Calcutta!, Which Premiered 50 Years Ago

“An erotic revue conceived by the English theater critic Kenneth Tynan, Oh! Calcutta! took it all off at the Eden Theater, a former pornographic cinema that had been renovated by the show’s producer. … [Tynan] solicit[ed] anyone and everyone to submit a titillating sketch. Nothing ‘about art or redeeming literary merit,’ he advised. A lot of the luminaries (Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien) dropped out or were dropped, but the final, all-male lineup included Sam Shepard, Jules Feiffer and John Lennon.” – The New York Times

Warner Is Paying Nearly Half A Billion Dollars To Keep J.J. Abrams

“Following a months-long courting process that included multiple suitors, WarnerMedia is in final negotiations for a new partnership with [Abrams’s company,] Bad Robot, sources say. … Abrams, who is currently editing Star Wars: Episode IX for Disney, was among the top producers in Warners’ TV fold at a time when brand-name showrunners are in increasingly high demand.” – The Hollywood Reporter

Art Requires Empathy. Machines Don’t Have It. So Can They Make Art We Will Relate To?

“We are able to empathise with nonhuman characters or intelligent machines in human-made fiction because they have been conceived by other human beings from the only subjective perspective accessible to us: ‘What would it be like for a human to behave as x?’ In order to understand machinic art as such – and assuming that we stand a chance of even recognising it in the first place – we would need a way to conceive a first-person experience of what it is like to be that machine. That is something we cannot do even for beings that are much closer to us.” – Aeon