Tag: 06.26.18

An Attempt To Understand Racial Disparity At Nonprofits In Oakland

A total of 138 organizations serving people of color in Oakland with budgets of $250,000 or less are included in the research. In addition to documenting the impact of these grassroots groups (hint: it’s not just about the arts), the report highlights challenges faced by smaller cultural organizations and offers four overarching recommendations for policymakers and funders to consider.

The Noxious Problem With Stupid Opinions

We are seeing the worsening of a trend that the 20th century German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse warned of back in 1965: “In endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood.” This form of “free speech,” ironically, supports the tyranny of the majority.

Closure Of Celebrated Rio Music Nightclub Becomes Symbol Of Brazil’s Crises

“It was Rio’s equivalent of the Blue Note or Ronnie Scott’s, a legendary downtown samba club famed for its caipirinha-fuelled jam sessions and for spawning some of the best young musicians in town. Today, though, Bar Semente lies abandoned, a graffiti-covered symbol of the city’s post-mega-event slump. An epitaph has been sprayed on its facade: ‘The Olympics, for who?'”

What It’s Like To Be Jonathan Franzen Today

What had he done that was so wrong? Here he was, in his essays and interviews, making informed, nuanced arguments about the way we live now — about anything from Twitter (which he is against) to the way political correctness has been weaponized to shut down discourse (which he is against) to obligatory self-promotion (which he is against) to the incessant ending of a phone call by saying, “I love you” (which he is against, but because “I love you” is for private) — and though critics loved him and he had a devoted readership, others were using the very mechanisms and platforms that he warned against (like the internet in general and social media in specific) to ridicule him.

How Armenian Folk Dance Helped Sustain The Diaspora

“‘The two means of expression, outside of being a member of the church, to mark you as an Armenian are dance and food,’ [dance historian] Gary Lind-Sinanian says. ‘Those are the two every Armenian family practices to some degree.’ Still, every village seemed to have its own style, he said. ‘When people make their pilgrimages to some monastery for a festival, they could see, when various groups danced to a melody, by the way they danced, you could tell where they came from. It still happens today at Armenian-American conventions. You could have a dance taking place, and someone familiar with regional dances could go through it and say, ‘Oh, that group is from Fresno, they’re from Los Angeles, that’s Chicago, that’s Philadelphia, that’s Boston.””

Would-Be Rock Star Involved In Trump-Russia Scandal Trolls Us All With New Music Video

“The video, for a song called ‘Got Me Good,’ begins with a man sitting in front of a wall of computer monitors — a hacker in Russia, it seems — and on those monitors we see real footage of the singer, Emin Agalarov, talking to the real Donald Trump. … Then the video shifts to a scene in which Emin walks through a hotel hallway with a Trump impersonator. They exchange a briefcase implied to be full of cash, as Emin sings to the Trump actor, ‘I wish you at least could be honest. I wish that you told me the truth.’ Soon, they are frolicking in a bed with several women. What makes this more than a silly spoof is that Emin Agalarov is one of the only people in the world who might have firsthand knowledge of what Trump did or didn’t do during his brief trip to Moscow in 2013.”

How St. Louis Has Reworked And Rethought The Gateway Arch: Philip Kennicott

50 years after Eero Saarinen’s landmark was dedicated, it has a new museum, a new promenade connecting it to the city, and a new concept. “The arch … has always been beloved because it binds together two feel-good ideas that are essential to American identity: a heroic past of grit and conquest, and a triumphant future of innovation. Now, well into the 21st century, the challenge is how to disentangle and even dismantle those ideas while salvaging the arch as a cultural object. The solution, mostly effective, has been to think in terms of connection, both to the city which hosts it, and to the deeper currents of history that led to its creation.”