“Memorials are how we recount and publicly value our history (although how we tell that history is often distorted by political correctness and who can afford to build them). Dismantling all of these Confederate monuments and simply pretending nothing ever happened – continues to happen 1 would serve no one.”
Tag: 06.23.15
Book Publishers Are Finally Starting To Invest In Real Fact-Checking
“By tradition and by default, books aren’t verified to anything near the standard of a magazine piece. Publishers don’t even consider verification their business. … In fact, the practice of checking books is fairly common, though it’s also expensive. This fall, for the first time, one publisher is even promising to pay for it. Which is a pretty radical departure.”
What We’ve Learned From 30 Years Of NYC’s Percent For Art Program
More particularly, what we’ve learned from the (relatively few) serious dust-ups over particular projects: “each example reveals the hazards of placing confidence in the outstanding reputation of an artist, and in the notion that all it takes for the public to accept assertions by the avant-garde is time and patience. … It is as if one of public art’s undervalued and poorly recognized functions is to test the idea that no matter how negatively people perceive a work of art at first, they will in due course acquiesce.”
Another Architectural Treasure Destroyed By ISIS
“While the destruction of medieval sites has received far less media attention than attacks on better known ancient sites such as Nimrud or Hatra, the loss of Iraq’s medieval sites is perhaps even more tragic due to the relative lack of scholarly documentation.”
Dancing The Refugee Experience
“Would you know the moment when you must flee your homeland? Where do you think is the safest place to go? What do you do once you find it isn’t a welcoming haven? How do you navigate the roadblocks of immigration, citizenship, language?” How do you navigate all of these issues in an artform that, by nature, rarely uses words?
Panned By Critics, “50 Shades Of Grey” Sequel Sells Million Copies In UK In First Week, Breaks Sales Records
“Released last Thursday, Grey tells the story of the S&M-focused relationship between businessman Christian Grey and shy student Anastasia Steele from the perspective of Christian – something its British author James writes in her dedication that fans had “asked … and asked … and asked … and asked” for.”
Cleveland To Turn A Traffic Island Into A Destination Public Space
“It’s a stage set,” James Corner says of his designs. “You’re trying to set up situations where it’s not just about having nice places to sit in the sun. It’s also the whole theatricality of people-watching, and you being seen, or you being not seen.”
Who’s Making Money In The Music Business (Job-By-Job Analysis)
“Billboard followed the money to determine who’s pulling in the largest (and smallest) paychecks in the industry: from the tens of millions in equity awards reaped by Apple executives to a radio-station mascot’s minimum wage.”
Claim: Is UK’s Creative Writing Program Actually Making Students’ Writing Worse?
The authors, a growing group that already numbers 35, say that national curriculum assessment criteria have become a “prescription for how to teach children to write (to pass the tests), with quite adverse effects on their writing skills”. This means, they say, that children are taught “not to use simple words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘small’ or ‘big’ but to always find other more ‘interesting’ words to replace them – such as ‘wonderful’, ‘terrible’, ‘minuscule’ or ‘enormous’”.
As Our Machines Get Smarter, Are We Nearing The End Of Work As We Know It?
“What does the ‘end of work’ mean, exactly? It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States remotely likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs. Eventually, by degrees, that could create a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.”