Tag: 07.18.20

When Lockdown Started, Powell’s Book Sales Soared. How’s Business Now? (Not So Good)

Emily Powell: “In some ways, it’s hard to say, because our trends have completely evaporated. Before the pandemic, I could have told you, ‘Oh, the first sunny day, and this month will look like this. The second sunny day will look like that.’ But all of those behaviors have gone away. So right now we’re on a relatively steady sales decline and trying to do our best to turn that in a different direction.” – Oregon Public Broadcasting

Can Playbill Survive COVID?

The Broadway program publication hasn’t printed programs since Broadway went dark. Website and social media traffic is up, but advertising has collapsed. “Just as it would be impossible to imagine New York City without Broadway once the pandemic passes, it’s pretty hard to picture Broadway without those little yellow booklets in hand when the curtain rises again.” – Fast Company

The Constant Low-Level Horror Of Our Online Lives

It’s just too, too weird. “To someone living exclusively online, many of Freud’s “primitive beliefs” would be literal truths. The dead live on in their videos and social media feeds. Thanks to targeted advertising, a pair of boots we put in our cart months ago stalks us at every turn. The notion that a single utterance can turn a random citizen into an influencer might have sounded to Freud like magical thinking. We see it happen every day.” – The New York Times

Susan Orlean Brightened The World By Getting Drunk, Missing Her Cat, And Tweeting

Despair about the state of the world, a little rosé, and voilà: “Orlean sent 27 entertaining, if typo-infused, tweets (read: “I do r e we. Know who is I my house”) that careen from the state of the world to the location of her cat, Leo, interspersed with frequent nods to her progressing drunkenness and her husband’s mounting concern for her well being. Taken together, the tweets feel oddly in tune with the tenor of the times — surreal, raw, a little unhinged.” – Los Angeles Times

Dystopian Fiction Can Help Us Live Through Dystopian Reality

You’d think living during a plague (The Stand, The Walking Dead, Domesday Book) and a time when unmarked federal agents are kidnapping people off the street (Little Brother, Hunger Games) might not be a good time to read dystopian fiction like Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. You’d be wrong. “What makes dystopian fiction different is that its creators are oddly optimists at heart, as we are. These works are not about prediction, but prevention. The stories warn of just how far things can go if action isn’t taken.” – Slate

If You’re In A Low-Virus Area, Is It Safe To Sing Yet?

Uhm. British government regulations are that singers and musicians stand three meters apart, or (for singers) back-to-back, or side-by-side (in other words, not in rows on risers). “If the chorus at the Last Night of the Proms had to stand side-by-side then Rule Britannia would begin in the Royal Albert Hall and stretch all the way down to the Natural History Museum, almost half a kilometre away.” Also, again, it may not be safe at all. – BBC