Interrogating The U.S. Constitution On A Theater Stage

In What the Constitution Means to Me, playwright and performer Heidi Schreck gives the speech she used to give as a high school debater, only to interrupt herself and speak as the adult Schreck about how the U.S. has failed to live up to the ideals in the Constitution and where the document itself falls short. She then ends the performance by debating a current high school debate champion about whether we should keep the Constitution or tear it up and start over. In a Q&A with Slate‘s Sam Adams, Schreck talks about how and why she does it.

A Jack Kerouac Bot? AI Program Produces Novel About Its Own Cross-Country Road Trip

Ross Goodwin rigged up a black Cadillac with a camera, a GPS unit, a microphone, a laptop, and a receipt printer, and he and friends drove it from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Data from the instruments was fed into AI software on the laptop that Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books, and over the four-day trip that software produced prose on the tiny printer. The assembled result, a book titled 1 the Road, “is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot’s life on the interstate; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri.”

Donor Recalls Loan Of 700 Artworks To Museum That Censored Mapplethorpe Show

Last month an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works in Porto, Portugal opened with 20 planned pieces removed from view, and the museum’s director, alleging censorship, resigned in protest. In response to the situation, collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas has moved to terminate his loan of some 700 objects to the institution, the Serralves Foundation.

Brazil’s National Museum Begins Long Process Of Recovery With Outdoor Exhibition

“Less than a month after a fire consumed the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro on 2 September, efforts are underway to revive the institution. The museum recently installed tents outside of the charred building to hold a temporary outdoor exhibition of pieces from its collection that were stored in other facilities in Brazil, totalling around 1.5 million objects.”

Four Ways Theatres Are Working To Get Out The Vote This Fall

In 2016, dozens of theatres around the country had a booth in their lobby where staffers registered voters during intermission. That has continued for the 2018 elections. Playwrights Horizons in New York City, who spearheaded a national effort in 2016 under the hashtag #PlayOurPart, is registering voters from Sept. 1 to Oct. 11 during performances of I Was Most Alive With You by Craig Lucas. Playwrights Horizons also provides information about other institutions can register voters on their website.

What Comes After “Western Civilization”

Today, few people talk earnestly about western civilisation. Mahatma Gandhi’s jibe – “it would be a good idea” – has stuck. But the veteran critic Desmond Fennell believes it is a useful concept to try to understand where the world is going. He argues that we are “between two civilisations”. Not just that but he believes a tectonic shift took place in the last century when the mask of western civilisation finally fell. In fact, he traces it to a particular date: August 6th, 1945