What Gentrification Does To Communities

Such urban neighborhoods appeal to money-strapped younger people as well as empty-nesters who enjoy city life and don’t want to depend on a car. And dense neighborhoods work for low-income earners if jobs are accessible by mass transit. The growing market for such neighborhoods—the classic gentrification magnet—is colliding with the reality that there are not enough of them in cities around the country.

When ‘Crossworditis’ Was Like Reefer Madness

In a feature introducing The Atlantic‘s new daily online mini-crossword, Adrienne LaFrance looks back to the pearl-clutching that accompanied the appearance, and rapid popularity, of crossword puzzles in newspapers just over a century ago. ” Doctors warned of the dreaded ‘crossword-puzzle headache.’ … Puzzles were banned in courthouses, where distracted public officials played on the job. … Newspapers reported an uptick of women divorcing puzzle-obsessed husbands. … People worried that puzzles would replace literature, that the utility of three-letter words — gnu! emu! eel! — would rewire people’s brains.”

A Revolution In Much-Derided Hotel Art

When we decided to do an episode about hotel art, we thought we would be doing an episode about, well, hotel art—exactly the sort of ugly, shoddy, cheap paintings that used to hang in Super 8s. But it turns out that’s an outdated understanding. Sure, you still regularly come across ugly work in hotels, but Super 8’s move away from kitsch is part of a decadeslong trend on the part of hotels—hotels of all price points—to reclaim hotel art. In recent years, hotel art has been transformed from something unconsidered and embarrassing into a selling point—a sign of sophistication and authenticity, an Instagram photo-op.

Kuwait Is On A Book-Banning Binge (They’ve Even Banned ‘The Little Mermaid’)

“In August, the government acknowledged that it had banned 4,390 books since 2014, hundreds of them this year, including many works of literature that had once been considered untouchable, setting off street demonstrations and online protests.” Among the Western titles on the censors’ list are One Hundred Years of Solitude, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and 1984 (in one Arabic translation but not another). As for poor little mermaid Ariel? As one activist says, “There are no hijab-wearing mermaids. The powers that be thought her dress was promiscuous. It’s humiliating.”

Defacing ‘Art’ – How Yasmina Reza’s Play Changes With Times And Places

The play has racked up productions in 30 languages and 45 countries in its 24-year history. “What’s so interesting is that, like certain plays by Pinter, perhaps, the play adapts itself to its actors, so it doesn’t seem to matter if you cast it with men in their 60s or their 30s,” says Christopher Hampton, who translated Reza’s French-language script into English.” (While the play’s three characters were originally written as male, “Art” has been performed by women as well.) Elisabeth Vincentelli talks with artists who’ve worked on or in the play about how the piece and the times adapt to each other.

University Presses Are Thriving

As anger spreads over libraries being squeezed by STEM journals from large for-profits, university presses are growing in part by looking beyond a narrow focus on library markets and publishing for new audiences, branching out into crossover titles, supplemental texts, regional books, popular reference works, manifestos, graphic novels, and the like. It’s an entrepreneurial flourishing that engages new readers, creates new communities, and extends the reputation of those universities fortunate enough to have presses.