Barry Jenkins on his new adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk: “[With Moonlight,] the whole movie is created to almost force the audience to confront what this character is feeling. And so it’s really easy to sit outside the film and just want to hug the film, to hug the main character. But this is Baldwin. In Baldwin, everyone’s implicated, including himself. So I think there’s not a passive path through this film.”
Tag: 10.04.18
The All-Powerful Media Influencers? Is It Just Empty Power?
By most accounts, “influencing” has something to do with social media and something to do with marketing. Money, power, and popularity are involved, as are brand identities, promotional samples, and likes. But like so much corporate jargon, when taken literally, the phrase, denoting only a vague power to affect, is spectacularly hollow.
Julia Turner Named New Arts Editor At The LA Times
Turner has been the editor-in-chief of Slate since 2014 and will relocate from New York. She joined Slate in 2003, working first as a reporter and critic on the culture team covering media, television and design, and eventually becoming culture editor, and then deputy editor. For a decade, she’s been one of the co-hosts of Slate’s critically acclaimed “Culture Gabfest” podcast, which she’ll continue co-hosting from Los Angeles.
Three Scholars Use Jargon To Fake Out Academic Journals. Here’s What They Learned
Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable.
Three Latter-Day Alan Sokals Publish Series Of Bogus Articles In Academic Journals
“One paper, published in a journal called Sex Roles, said that the author had conducted a two-year study involving ‘thematic analysis of table dialogue’ to uncover the mystery of why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters. Another, … published in a journal of feminist social work and titled ‘Our Struggle Is My Struggle,’ simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The three came clean this week, writing that their aim was to expose the problem of what they call “academic grievance studies.”
New AI Program Will Let Non-Pros Erase Things From Photos
“Upload a photo, define what you’d like to see removed, and [MIT Media Lab’s] Deep Angel will try to seamlessly erase whatever it is you want gone. The purpose of all this … is part media literacy, part experiment. Normally, the power to disappear people from images and the public record has only been wielded by governments, powerful heads of state and folks who crop others out of their profile pictures. Deep Angel, hopefully, will get you thinking about what it means to actually have the power to easily and seamlessly control what appears in images and what cannot.” (Uh-huh. Hopefully.)
Recording Academy, To Address Diversity Problem, Adds 900 Members To Pool Of Grammy Voters
“Invites were extended to a broad range of music creators, including vocalists, songwriters, instrumentalists, producers and engineers. All 900 invitees, who were pre-qualified to vote by the Recording Academy, are female and/or people of color and/or under 39.”
Philadelphia Theatre Company Makes High-Stakes Return From (Semi-)Hiatus
After years of money troubles and more than one near-collapse, the city’s flagship non-profit stage company recruited a new producing artistic director and then took 16 months off, presenting only a few imported events. Now that new boss, Paige Price, has gotten the outstanding $1 million in debt paid off and rearranged operations, and next week PTC returns to main-stage productions with Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. Will the audience return? And what comes afterward?
BBC Philharmonic’s Next Chief Conductor Is Omer Meir Wellber
The 36-year-old Israeli takes over the Manchester-based broadcasting orchestra next season, succeeding Juanjo Mena. He is also chief conductor at the Semperoper in Dresden.
Violinist Leila Josefowicz Wins $100,000 Avery Fisher Prize
When she was given the prize on Thursday night, she was performing with the New York Philharmonic in Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto — which, as reporter Michael Cooper observes, “counts almost as early music for her.”