Tag: 08.16.19

Phone Booths Are Mostly Dead, But Not All Dead, In Spain

Is the phone booth a thing of art? Of commerce? Or is it just a piece of trash from an older age – a piece of trash no one, including the phone companies, wants to deal with? While Spaniards use their mobiles to call someone around 100 million times a day, and use WhatsApp for messages 125 million times a day, the number of phone calls from or between pay phones is a low 6,180. And then there are the reasons to use them: The authorities say it’s “to send a threat, claim a debt in an unorthodox way or for a date between lovers or adulterers who must hide their relationship. The advantage of the phone booth over the mobile is that the calls leave no trace.” – El País

Ruling: Calatrava Must Pay Venice For The Damage Rolling Luggage Has Done To His Bridge

Whoops, forgetting (or neglecting to worry about) maintenance isn’t going to cut it anymore, or at least not in this case. “The five judges on a Roman court overseeing the use of public funds ruled on Aug. 6 that Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish-Swiss architect globally renowned for his sleek and elegantly curved designs, had committed ‘macroscopic negligence’ in constructing the glass-and-steel bridge that opened near Venice’s train station in 2008. They fined him 78,000 euros.” – The New York Times

The Friends Who All Dress Up As The Same Movie Character

Yes, that finishes as “stay together,” of course. Though it’s a bit unusual in the cosplay community, these women have a different idea. “It was just so nice to share our resources. It made both of us so much better at what we were doing. … Actually, all three of us took ridiculous pictures of us eating peanut butter sandwiches [like Black Widow does in Endgame]. We weren’t like, ‘Oh, she stole my idea.’ No one stole anyone’s idea. We all watched the same movie.” – The Atlantic

New Cookbooks Show How Publishing Can Change – And Preserve – Regional Community

India is a huge country with many different regional cuisines. But cookbooks haven’t reflected that – until now. “As the publishing industry’s view of Indian cuisine approaches homogenization … recent years have seen a quiet renaissance of cookbooks focused on particular communities and geographies of India. Some are published privately by earnest ladies’ community groups and some are printed by small presses, while a few are helmed by big publishing houses. And it is through these essential books that we consume our country.” – LitHub

At Edinburgh Fringe, There’s A Tremendous Amount Of Raw Talent That Needs Support To Thrive

Lyn Gardner says that “the fringe is like a machine churning out ever more raw talent, which is attractive to venues who buy it up cheaply. But the issue is they then offer very little ongoing support to develop that talent in a way that allows companies to grow and develop.” (Instead, they just get more raw, cheap talent the next year.) – The Stage (UK)

What Happened To The Last Member Of The Harlem Renaissance?

Dorothy West was called Zora Neale Hurston’s “Kid Sister,” and her books were not immediate successes, partly, some say, because she wrote about the Black middle class. “She wrote ‘posh black’ at a time when ‘broke black’ was in vogue, and this sits at the heart of her flickering obscurity, a myopia in mainstream culture that struggled to perceive blackness as anything more than one-dimensional.” – The Guardian (UK)