Total sales were up 5.4% to £3.5bn, according to the latest figures released by National Lottery operator Camelot, translating into £793.2m for good causes. A fifth of this is allocated to the UK’s four Arts Councils, meaning they will collectively receive just under £159m – a 23% increase on the £129m lottery funding they received this time last year.
Tag: 08.16.18
The Ways We Imagine Will Shakespeare’s Wife
And imagining her is what we do: we have next to no reliable evidence about Anne Hathaway. Over the last couple of centuries, she’s been cast as either the devoted wife-and-mother who kept the proverbial home fires burning in Stratford or the woman who got Will to knock her up and then drove him away to London. With the new century, though, new ways of picturing Hathaway have been popping up.
World’s Best Paid Actress Is (Alas, And Of Course) Far Behind Her Male Counterpart
With $40.5 million, Scarlett Johansson is the highest-ranking female on Forbes‘s annual list of best-paid acting professionals. Her earnings come mostly from her role as Black Widow in the Avengers franchise. (The figures for the highest-paid male actors are far higher.)
Is It Art, Or Is It Space Junk? Artists And Astronomers In Conflict Over Low-Orbit Works
In January, Peter Beck sent his Humanity Star (described by irked scientists as a three-foot-wide disco ball) into orbit, and in October, Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector will follow. In an article headlined “Hey Artists, Stop Putting Shiny Crap Into Space,” George Dvorsky looks at the origin of these two pieces and gets some choice words from each side of the divide.
The Obsessive Fans Of ‘Twin Peaks’, And The Answers To The Questions They Obsess Over
The Internet was the perfect way for those who loved the original series to bat their theories back and forth, and from the medium’s days, that’s what they did. Joanna Robinson offers a brief history of that fandom and how it affected the Twin Peaks franchise and eventual reboot – and she gets a few mysteries clarified by co-creator Mark Frost.
In Two Months, Alaska’s Largest Theatre Bounces Back From Financial Disaster
“In June things were looking bleak for Perseverance Theatre, a 40-year-old institution and the largest theatre in Alaska. The company had been forced to cancel its spring show, a new musical called Snow Child, had furloughed several employees, and was more than $200,000 in debt. Local press wondered if the theatre was on its deathbed. Then something miraculous happened.”
A Neuroscientist Finds She Has Been Reading Differently? Why? She Investigates
The reason no one’s reading War and Peace is, Clay Shirky asserted, because it’s “too long, and not so interesting.” Instead of mourning the loss of the “cathedral” reading experience offered by a great 19th-century novel, we should be adapting to the “bazaar” culture of the internet. If the medium trains our supremely adaptable brains to work differently, well, maybe that’s because they need to work that way to take advantage of “the net’s native forms.”
His Book Is A Hit. Movie Producers Want It. But He Just Ran Out Of Phone Minutes In Prison…
The book was just published by Knopf, and is already a top seller on Amazon, and got the kind of author profile in last Sunday’s The New York Times that is usually jet fuel for a book to film deal. Trouble is, the author is in prison until 2020 for committing the bank robberies that are described in harrowing detail in the novel. And late this week, he ran out of phone minutes and will not be able to entertain any offers until he can again use the jailhouse phone on Sunday.
Toronto Artists Support Gentrification Tax As Housing Prices Soar
“If a neighbourhood is valuable because of the culture that’s produced there over time by a lot of people, when gentrification occurs, that money is still leaving that neighbourhood, and displacing the original producers of that place,” said Jane Hutton, a Waterloo architecture professor in the group.
This Is How A Poetry-Reading Class Can Go Horribly Wrong
Close reading is hard, which is how this class ended up telling its professor that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was about a prostitute. “The predominant interpretation holds sway because students have been trained that their emotional response to a text is just as valid as, say, what it means to read a text within its historical or cultural context.”