“Operation Car Wash” has rocked Brazil with its revelations of executives and politicians helping themselves to money from Petrobras, the country’s nationalized oil company. An exhibit of works confiscated from the alleged culprits has become a huge hit.
Tag: 08.03.15
The Nonprofit Hunger Games, And How We Might Stop Them
“We all got to talking, and it turned out the two seniors [at our table] were major donors to Jane’s organization who also happened to like Vietnamese food. I said, ‘Hey, I know a great Vietnamese restaurant! I’d love to take you sometime. Maybe the four of us could get lunch together.’ There was a 20-second stare-down between Jane and me. … [Later,] I ran into her at another event, and she introduced me to others as ‘The guy who tried to poach my donors.'”
Meet The Last Living Link To The Bertolt Brecht Golden Age Of East German Theatre
“[Manfred] Karge, now 77, has been called ‘East Germany’s Orson Welles’ or ‘the Brandenburg Beckett’ – though those aren’t comparisons he is comfortable with. … ‘Beckett knew exactly how he wanted his plays to be performed. Mine don’t even have stage directions.'”
Why Calling Something “Children’s Theatre” Is Self-Limiting
“Identity-based representation practices that reinforce constructions of child/adult will generally limit the meanings of cultural codes, exploit children’s performative labors, promote ideological doctrines, exclude children from voice in production/representation, and reinforce acceptance of the idea that children are not fully people.”
Can Machines Help Us Understand How We Communicate?
“At its core, this enterprise is about using computers to understand how humans use language, including what that language means to people and how it persuades. Just down the road from Stanford is an enormous industry whose profitability depends on understanding this. Academia and Silicon Valley are converging in this territory: technology firms are eager to hire researchers who can help them turn large volumes of human-generated text into money and eager to collaborate with scholars in order to reap the practical benefit of academic knowledge. And an enormous surveillance apparatus, in the United States and abroad, is similarly interested in extracting meaning and predictions from volumes of text.”
As The Met Abandons Blackface, A Look At The Legacy Of African Americans In Opera
“Nineteenth-century Black singers like Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Sissieretta Jones sang opera but gave recitals, because the opera houses weren’t hiring them. Black churches were doing Verdi’s Requiem with all-Black casts and musicians.”
‘Athlètes Et Artistes’ – CNN Admires The Men Of The Paris Opera Ballet
“They are ‘les danseurs,’ the professional male ballet dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet. They are the epitome of strength, their bodies acting as machines of poetry with each and every point of their toes.”
The Melancholy Pop Idol Who Haunts China
“There’s another popular saying: Wherever there are Chinese people, there is Teresa Teng’s music. I never appreciated her symbolism as a child, back when her music seemed soft and ubiquitous. But it’s not hard to imagine how Teng’s songs about love and distance spoke to the various migrations and political estrangements throughout the Chinese-speaking world. For immigrants throughout the Chinese diaspora, her music was a reminder of their journeys, an excuse to indulge in nostalgia, three or four minutes at a time.
How To You Contextualize Theatre To The Audience It Wants To Serve?
“What quickly became apparent is that the local authority officers share our ambition to find ways of increasing the perceived “usefulness” of the arts and asking: if the regular audience to theatre comprises only 8% of the population, what might the other 92% be interested in?”
Lament Of The Anti-Social Writer (Does This Mean I Can’t Have A Career?)
“There’s my avoidance of readings, my fake enthusiasm as I swindle my own students out of their Friday nights to go to a lecture I won’t attend, my gag-triggering physical loathing of bookstores, my requirement that reading materials appear on my nightstand by benevolent conjury, without any consumer effort from me. There’s my acute failure as an educator to fill any tiny part of the role of writing-community steward that is assumed of me. There’s my own titanic hypocrisy most recently as I think about promoting a new book in the very community I can’t show love for. So here I am. In all my humility.”