“Money is the last taboo in contemporary writing — there is no Fifty Shades of Green. I have a simple, crude, and self-serving idea of why that is the case: the people in our world, from book editors to magazine and newspaper editors to writers, usually hail from pretty pampered backgrounds and live pretty pampered lives. Often they’re downright rich. It’s an article of faith among these liberal elites, if you will pardon the loaded term, that they got to where they are all by themselves, and that the meritocracy works — all government has to do is level the playing field. So they talk a lot about identity, which is an easy addition to their moral equity and requires no change to their lives.”
Tag: 07.07.17
Why SoundCloud Shutting Down Would Be Disastrous For Indie Music
“The streaming giant - which laid off 40 percent of its staff [last] Thursday - has long struggled to stay both stable and independent. But its unique contributions to music consumption can’t be overstated.”
What’s Going On With Fusion? It’s Being Splintered (Ahem) By Univision
Last year Univision bought up what was left of Gawker‘s network of sites and renamed it Gizmodo Media Group, into which it merged the Fusion.net site. But Univision also owns the Fusion television network (the Hispanic media giant’s first push into English-language broadcasting), so that channel is going to the Fusion.net address, while Fusion’s online journalism is moving to a new site called Splinter. Editor-in-chief Dodai Stewart says about the name, “Our aim is to do the kind of news coverage and commentary that gets under your skin.”
New Mayor Wants To Pull Books Depicting Same-Sex Unions From Verona’s Schools And Libraries
Says Federico Sboarina, who was elected in late June, “I am convinced that the family is composed [of a] mother and father, and I will defend this value in the education of children and young people.” Other local politicians are joining library and publishing organizations and gay advocates in pushing back against the policy.
Music Meta-Data – If It’s Missing, Does It Exist?
“The back of the original CD, and the LP, lists personnel. There is studio information and other details. On other releases there might be liner notes or additional images. This material is what I fed on as a young listener, and I’m still hungry for it today. Much of it disappears when I rip a disc to my hard drive, and online services generally don’t fill the gaps. Sure, background is available to varying degrees in a constellation of mutually supportive and competitive complementary services, from Discogs to Genius.com to Wikipedia to AllMusic.com, but that collective effort doesn’t satisfactorily fill the metadata void left when online albums are shorn of their contextual information.”
Does Opera Need Movie Directors To Save The Art Form?
“With all due respect, opera critics risk missing what the rest of us will see and hear in the new era in which an increasingly significant portion of the audience is at cinema relays: the cross-cutting between scenes, the aesthetic reconstruction of theatre-bound drama through montage and even, sometimes, sophisticated sound design denied to mere opera directors. Just the things, in fact, film directors are good at.”
Scientists Have Made A Machine That Can Write Poetry (And Fool Readers Into Believing A Human Wrote It)
“A neural network trained on thousands of lines of poetry has tried its hand at penning its own rhymes that mimic certain forms of verse. Its best efforts even fool people into thinking they’re reading the words of a human poet, rather than the algorithmic output of a cold-hearted AI.”
Expansion Plans For Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Museum Draws Ire Of Preservationists
Particularly after a statement by the museum’s director Janne Sirén: “We are also not in the business of collecting buildings. We are an art museum and our service is to our public and to the artworks in our custody. The buildings are here to serve us, and not us as the staff, but the public and the art. That is our foremost responsibility. The buildings are the utilitarian tools, in some respect, that allow us to accomplish our mission.”
Architect Gordon Bunshaft’s Albright-Knox Museum Is A Modern Masterpiece; Now The Museum Wants To Alter It
“The plan, which is still its early phases, would see Bunshaft’s tranquil gap between his black box and the 1905 building filled in with a new, glass-enclosed space; Bunshaft’s galleries and courtyard would be demolished. Surface parking currently in front of the 1905 building would be converted back into green space—as it was before the 1962 expansion—with parking and future gallery space buried underneath.”
Tactic: American Networks Try To Hide Bad Shows From TV Listings Services By Mis-Listing Them
“When a network TV show performs badly, the networks deliberately introduce errors into the episodes’ metadata before submitting it to the Nielsen ratings, so that the episode is counted as a separate show and doesn’t bring the season’s average rating down.”