“YouTube Shorts will provide a number of tools to allow creators to make [15-second] videos on their mobile devices. It will consist of a ‘multi-segment camera’ that can combine separate clips, as well as speed controls and a timer and countdown so you can create videos without needing to hold your phone. Its most TikTok-like feature? The library of music you can use to record with.” – Mashable
Tag: 09.15.20
Booker Prize Shortlist Is Most Diverse, And Most American, Ever (But Hilary Mantel Isn’t On It)
It’s not only Mantel: Anne Tyler and Colum McCann were also among the semifinalists who failed to advance. Of the six writers on the shortlist, four are women, four are nonwhite, and four, including one dual-national, are from the United States, a fact sure to incense those who still oppose the 2014 decision to open the Booker to any author writing in English and published in the UK. – The Guardian
The Monuments America Needs?
When we speak of monuments in America, we’re often talking about structures such as statues, obelisks, and memorials that celebrate a relatively narrow band of our history: the Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the civil-rights era. Our monumental landscape preserves a sense that we are an exceptional, upstart nation. (American civilization may not boast standing stones that date back to the prehistoric era, but we do have Carhenge.) – The New Yorker
JK Rowling Under Attack For Character In Her New Book
Penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood is Rowling’s fifth book to feature private investigator Cormoran Strike. An early review of the book by Telegraph writer Jake Kerridge described it as featuring a “transvestite serial killer,” which inspired readers’ anger and spawned the Twitter hashtag #RIPJKRowling — a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the author’s career. – CBC
Clarinetist Anthony McGill Wins $100,000 Avery Fisher Prize
Mr. McGill was the Philharmonic’s first Black principal musician when he joined in 2014; he is currently its only Black player. He appears at David Geffen Hall and elsewhere as a concerto soloist, and is in a trio with his brother, Demarre McGill — the principal flute of the Seattle Symphony — and the pianist Michael McHale. In 2009, he performed at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. – The New York Times
Bill T. Jones Dances With Rice
Well, to be truthful, it’s his performers who are engaging the grain directly. Artist Lee Mingwei’s performance installation Our Labyrinth, a meditative ritual in which performers sweep a mound of rice across a floor, has arrived at the Met Museum. Met Live Arts director Limor Tomer got the idea to add movement by Jones, who says he isn’t changing Lee’s piece but rather “infecting” it. – The New York Times
Syracuse Refuse: Everson Museum Discards its Pollock to “Address Inequality” & Pursue the New
I’ve been planning to call out the lamentable decision of the Everson Museum in Syracuse to jettison its only Jackson Pollock painting “in order to refine, diversify, and build the museum’s collection for the future” (in the words of the museum’s self-justification). – Lee Rosenbaum