Why “Reality” Television Is Here To Stay

“Over a decade into its life, reality TV is here to stay. The genre that the networks politely refer to as “alternative programming” is not a passing trend, even while its ratings have cooled significantly in recent years. Just like sitcoms, dramas, game shows, and talk shows, it’s a TV staple — the American cheese next to the ketchup, milk, and eggs.”

Documentary Photographers Have Become An Endangered Species

They are “threatened by the destruction of their professional habitat. Magazines that used to commission such photographers to create in-depth chronicles of social phenomena, cultural conflict and struggle and change within communities have either gone out of print (the most legendary, Life, died as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000) or are operating on scarcer and scarcer resources.”

‘Pop-Up Shows’ Pop Up All Over England

“Already a big trend in retail and catering, this year the established names in the arts have embraced the idea of using short-lived venues for exhibitions, dance, theatre and film. … Garages, car parks, warehouses and disused transport terminals are all being given an unexpected afterlife this summer as hundreds of pop-up shows bloom across the nation.”

An Audience Of One And A Cast Of Hundreds: You Me Bum Bum Train

In the Barbican’s fastest-selling show of the year, “[e]ach person, or passenger, is taken on a 40-minute ride by wheelchair where they quantum leap into unrelated scenarios, becoming the main protagonist in each scene, often with hundreds of volunteer performers looking on. … It’s very much like The Truman Show, with all the details very exact.”

You’d Never Guess That This Was One Of Borges’s Favorite Authors

“If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff. … Borges not only commented on books that didn’t exist. He read books – pulpy and arcane alike – that few others bothered to see.”

Philip Larkin Wasn’t Such A Terrible Human Being

“After the publication of … Andrew Motion’s biography in the early 1990s, there was an outpouring of loathing for Larkin the man; a hysteria of disapproval that some feared would eventually destroy his reputation as a poet, too.” But newly-published letters as well as testimony from close associates may moderate, if not repair, Larkin’s reputation as a person.