Hollywood Worries About A Netflix Monopoly (And It Should)

The streaming pioneer is spending $6 billion a year on making shows. “Out of the blue Netflix comes into the market and says, ‘We’re going to give you a number [to license a network show],’ ” says one television agent. “For the studios, it was, ‘Holy shit. Do we even need a cable sale?’ They all got addicted to crack. Nobody really thought they’d be a competitor on the originals market. They used stuff from the studios and became important. Now you see the backlash.”

Swing Dancing’s Sexual Assault Scandal, And How The Lindy Hop Sommunity Handled It

“With his silky moves and electric personality, [Steven Mitchell soon rose to prominence as a swing dancer, receiving a star’s welcome in every city. When interest in swing experienced a resurgence, particularly in the 1990s, Mitchell – depending on who you ask – either rode the wave or created it. But there’s a group of women who know a very different Steven Mitchell.”

Why Is So Much Of The Internet Blue?

“How did we get the blue regime that [Paul] Hebert’s actually quantified, and many others have observed? It’s not like there’s some centralized Web design authority dictating these things. Anecdotally, Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is blue because he’s red-green colorblind, and Google has said the color clicked best in rigorous A/B tests. But the underlying reason may be that design, like art, imitates life.”

The Coming V&A Branch Museum In Scotland

“On the north bank of the River Tay, Scotland’s new museum of design is taking shape. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, it resembles a beached ship. The first major project by a London museum in Scotland, the V&A Museum of Design Dundee represents an opportunity to show the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to a new audience in the UK. The process has not been without bumps.”

Teaching Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’

“The labor itself of ‘proving racism,’ and providing testimony is heartbreaking. Talking about it in spaces like poetry workshops, about the craft of it, breaking it down like it wasn’t about living people in that room, as though we can’t spend our entire lives with our own testimony, as though we weren’t witnessing in each poem we wrote? That just seems excruciating.”