Tag: 07.29.20

Reporter At DC’s WAMU Harassed Female Colleagues For Years — And Kept His Job After Two Final Warnings

Martin Di Caro, an award-winning transportation correspondent at Washington’s public radio news station from 2012 to 2017, was outrageous enough in hitting on junior employees at WAMU, local transportation advocates, and even staffers at the City Council and Metro that seemingly every woman in DC’s transport community had “a Martin story.” Many of those women are now speaking out. (And there are now calls at WAMU for the resignation of general manager JJ Yore for having kept Di Caro on staff for so long.) – DCist

Cultural Turmoil In Bolivia – Museum Directors Fired

The dismissals are only a small part of the changes implemented by the new government. On 1 July, the National Archaeology Museum (MUNARQ), which answered to the ministry of cultures and tourism, was closed by the police, its personnel evicted, and the future of its highly perishable artefacts put at risk. Two days later it was announced that the ministry of cultures and tourism (created by a Morales presidential decree in 2009) would itself disappear and become a vice-ministry under the ministry of education. This prompted protests from Bolivian artists, who demanded that it be re-established and denounced the lack of support they have received during the Covid-19 epidemic. – Apollo

Writing To Write… And Not To Be Read. This Is Academia

Writing for the sake of publication—instead of for the sake of being read—is academia’s version of “teaching to the test.” The result is papers few actually want to read. First, the writing is hypercomplex. Yes, the thinking is also complex, but the writing in professional journals regularly contains a layer of complexity beyond what is needed to make the point. It is not edited for style and readability. Most significantly of all, academic writing is obsessed with other academic writing—with finding a “gap in the literature” as opposed to answering a straightforwardly interesting or important question. – The Point

Defending Kitsch

Kitsch is a conflicted term—hard to strictly define, but as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s joke about pornography, one knows it when one sees it. For the purchasers of kitsch in nineteenth-century Munich, reproductions of elaborate and intricate decoration were a means of class ascension. But they also signaled a type of bourgeoisie cluelessness concerning taste, discretion, and style. – JSTOR

Internet Archive Responds To Publishers’ Copyright Lawsuit Over Lending

Controlled Digital Lending’s essential position is that it’s fine for a nonprofit like the archive or a library to scan a print copy of a book it owns, then lend that digital scan out on a one-copy-per-one-user basis. The print copy is to be unavailable while the digital copy is loaned, meaning that only one copy is out at a time in any format, and an author or publisher has the right to opt out of this by asking. Many rights holders have, indeed, asked to opt out because, as they see it, the user of a loaned digital copy of their book has paid nothing for that loan and this means copyright revenue has gone unpaid. – Publishing Perspectives

Why Racism Is Deeply Built Into Arts Institutional Structures

David Balzer: “Here, I want to go beyond critiquing institutional messaging and superficial pledges towards diversity, equity, and inclusion. Instead, I want to use my experience as the former co-leader of a cultural nonprofit — a white, cis-gender queer who attempted, not always successfully, to change that nonprofit’s relationship to colonialism and white supremacy — to explain why such statements were doomed to fail.” – Hyperallergic