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.
Tag: 10.01.18
Netflix To Experiment With Letting Viewers Choose Their Own Endings
Netflix is planning to roll out interactive features on shows including Black Mirror that will enable viewers to choose their own endings
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.”
Fire At Venice’s La Fenice Opera House (It Didn’t Burn Down This Time, Thank God)
An electrical fire in the theatre’s backup power system broke out briefly on Monday and was quickly extinguished. In 1996, a fire set by contractors working on a renovation burned the entire building to the ground.
Report: Canadian Newspapers Are Producing Half As Many Stories As Ten Years Ago
The number of newspaper articles produced over the last 10 years has shrunk by almost half; wire service stories are taking the place of local political coverage; and of the articles still being produced, fewer include coverage of democratic institutions and civic affairs.
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
Son-Of-NAFTA Requires Canada To Cave On Copyright Law
The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), announced late Sunday night, commits Canada to extending the term of copyright by two decades, from 50 years after the author’s death to 70 years. While that sounds like a relatively minor change, University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist said the costs associated with it could be significant.