Blockbuster, it turns out, ended up doing a very good job of fighting back against Netflix and might well have won, but it made some fundamental mistakes that ended up dooming its future. – Recode
Tag: 06.30.20
Don’t Underestimate The (Anti-Racist) Power Of Black Fiction
Reading Ibraham X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning or How to Be an Anti-Racist, or maybe cuddling up to Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors’ When They Call You a Terrorist, may be great for catching up on what should have been in our educations already. But “fiction gives you a window into both lives you know and recognize and ones you don’t. It helps you to put yourself in the shoes of those characters, even when you have a different perspective when it comes to race, gender or sexual identity.” – Time
Higher Ed Will Be Reimagined. But University Boards Are Not The Ones To Do It
It has become a truism to say the coronavirus pandemic will change everything about higher education. But few discuss who should shape this change. The faculty? The student body? The public? Or the business-executive trustees that Thorstein Veblen believed were destroying the essential nature of academe? – Chronicle of Higher Education
Conscripted To Be Private Bandleader For Central Africa’s Notorious Dictator-Emperor
Back in the late 1960s, Charlie Perrière was a struggling young musician in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, and about to leave for Congo when he was personally summoned by President Jean-Bédel Bokassa — the one who later crowned himself Emperor (just like his hero, Napoleon) and fed prisoners to crocodiles and lions. Bokassa told Perrière not to emigrate and subsequently drafted him to lead the president’s personal orchestra. Not only did Perrière survive, he became famous enough that, more than 40 years later, young rebels pillaging the capital spared his house. – Narratively
A TV Critic Considers The Most Compelling Villain On Our Screens This Summer: Karen
Hank Stuever: “As soon as one Karen flames out across the Internet, another apparently more unhinged Karen rises in her place. … Amid a culturally fractious and largely failed attempt to quell a killer pandemic, paired with a stirring surge in support of civil rights and police reform, there’s a strange sort of solace that comes from watching these Karen … videos spring up like summer dandelions across the regulation-green lawn of the fragile, white American psyche.” – The Washington Post
Has This Dealer Really Found A Long-Lost Frida Kahlo Painting? Probably Not
“Scholars in the work of surrealist Frida Kahlo have searched for more than six decades for The Wounded Table, a 1940 oil painting illuminating her pain over the breakup of her marriage to muralist Diego Rivera that hasn’t been seen since an exhibition in Poland. And the historians strongly reject the idea that the mystery of its whereabouts has been solved, as claimed by a Spanish art dealer who says the painting is now sitting in a London warehouse awaiting a buyer willing to spend more than 40 million euros.” – Yahoo! (AP)
Mellon Foundation To Invest In Prison Libraries
The prison library program will give each of the 1,000 prisons the same 500-book collection selected by the project’s leaders. The collections, which Dr. Alexander called “freedom libraries,” are to include a broad variety of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, science, social thought and more. – The New York Times
Why Letting Your Mind Wander Is Good For You
While it is certainly not inevitable that children lose their sense of wonder as they grow up, and while adults are in principle as capable of experiencing wonder as children, it is to be expected that, as the world becomes more and more familiar to children as they age, they will experience wonder less readily. – Psyche
India Bans Chinese Social Media Apps
India has banned video-sharing social network TikTok and messaging platform WeChat along with 57 other Chinese developed apps over national security and privacy concerns, as tensions between the two countries continue to rise. – The Hollywood Reporter
How A Girls Choir Pivoted And Is Thriving Online
Amazingly, not only has the group continued the girls’ education online, it has used the constraints to its advantage by bringing in guest artists for master classes and increasing one-on-one instruction. At a time when many of the girls are deeply moved, not to mention upset by recent events, the continuation of study has doubtless been a lifeline. – San Francisco Classical Voice