Johanna Anderson said the situation had become so financially serious for university libraries that it was time for MPs and competition authorities to hold publishers to account. She cited the example of an economics book that costs £44 for a print copy but is £423 for a single e-book user and £500 for three users. An employment law book costs £50 for a hard copy, but is £1,600 for three users of the digital version. – BBC
Tag: 11.16.20
French Authors Say They’ll Pay COVID Fines For Paris Book Shops That Stay Open
At the beginning of the lockdown more than two weeks ago, the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, pleaded – unsuccessfully – for bookshops to be allowed to remain open and asked the public not to use Amazon. The call has been echoed by the former president François Hollande. – The Guardian
Why The Arts Are Important In Times Of Crises
“Some people were willing to forego their meagre ration of food and forget their fatigue to attend the artistic performances in the concentration camp. For me this is a potent reminder to challenge crude approaches to ranking basic human needs and the components of a decent human life.” – Aeon
Political Theater Moves Into Nonfiction — Is It Drama Or Seminar?
Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has become “the grandmother of [a] genre” that includes, just this fall, Kristina Wong for Public Office (about Wong’s run for a local commission in Los Angeles), Lessons in Survival (actors repeating, complete with pauses and tics, observations of prominent Black Americans about society), Denis O’Hare’s What the Hell Is a Republic, Anyway? (using the history of the Roman Republic to examine the American one), and Melissa Dunphy’s The Gonzales Cantata (an oratorio setting the 2007 testimony of George W. Bush’s Attorney General before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Jesse Green looks at these pieces and considers “what it means for performers to take public policy as their script at a time when policymakers seem to be taking public performance as theirs.” – The New York Times
Bruno Barbey, Famed War Photographer For Magnum, Dead At 79
He captured some of the most memorable journalistic images of key events of the late 20th century: the 1968 riots in Paris; the Troubles in Northern Ireland; the Biafran war in Nigeria; the Solidarity demonstrations in Poland; the first Gulf War and the burning of the Kuwait oil fields by retreating Iraqi troops. – The New York Times
The Art Of The Trump Goodbye
Is Trump like King Lear, raging naked on the heath and desperately hanging on to the increasingly diminished trappings of power even as they are stripped from him? Or is he more like Bartleby the Scrivener, the inscrutable model of passive resistance who one day declines to do any more work or indeed leave the building, declaring: “I would prefer not to?” – The New York Times
Assessing The Art World’s Performance During Trump
The arts exist as a smaller bubble within the larger bubble of liberal media culture. And doubling down on affirming the sense of enlightened cultural superiority has larger potential negative consequences. – Artnet
International Enrollment At US Universities Down 43 Percent
The survey provides a first look at how hard international enrollments have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey found that one in five international students are studying online from outside the U.S. Ninety percent of responding institutions reported student deferrals, collectively reporting that nearly 40,000 international students have deferred their studies to a future term. – InsideHigherEd
A Theatre Student Researches How Theatre Has Coped With Lockdown. Here’s What She Found
It became evident to me that companies that had a strong relationship with their audience base before the pandemic had seen continued support. Theatres like Cape Fear Regional Theatre, which specializes in “edutainment” (a combination of performance and education), received an outpouring of verbal support from parents who were overjoyed that their child could go to a sanitized and physically distanced afterschool environment and have a sense of normalcy. – HowlRound
How Our World Has Changed In The Age Of Instant Information
The most radical change that instant information has made is the levelling of content. There is no longer a distinction between things that everyone knows, or could readily know, and things that only experts know. – The New Yorker