At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature. That means that where fine details once thrived, splashyprints have taken over, grounding text that’s sturdy enough to be deciphered on screens ranging from medium to miniscule. – New York Magazine
The history of ideas, in fact, suggests the opposite… The assumption that the last 50 years or so have marked some unprecedented break with a previous age of truth reflects both an inattention to history and an attitude that might be labeled “pessimistic narcissism,” since it yet again focuses attention on the generation that came of age in the 1960s and ’70s.
Lionel Shriver: “For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-bound to demolish the best about them as well.” – Harper’s
“I haven’t seen a dumbing down of anything – at least not yet. Looking at new projects, you have to think about who is writing it and who is going to be involved. But I see the rising competition as a positive thing. It’s good for actors but I think television as a whole has been enriched.” – The Guardian
“A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.” – The Atlantic
In 2019, Sundance is arguably more mainstream than ever. Many options at the festival this year are the kinds of projects major studios used to make all of the time—crowd-pleasing comedies, true-story adaptations, and teen romances. With Hollywood now consumed by brand management, major franchises, and mega-budgeted blockbusters, independent producers have become the caretakers of the midsize movie. – The Atlantic
The young lady née Helen Gould Beck found herself stranded in Chicago when the ballet company she was touring with collapsed, and the only job she could get was as a stripper at a nightclub in the Loop. She ended up as a star attraction at the 1939 World’s Fair, known for her fan dance and her “bubble dance” with a 65-inch balloon (and nothing else) — an act she toured with for years afterward as Sally Rand. — The Oregonian
What was new here was that formerly fringe filmmakers were now getting big crossover deals and gushy reviews, redefining indie cinema in the public consciousness. This began a snowball effect with other newer and younger would-be writers and directors. Sundance and Cannes 1989 were the first major “Yes We Can!” moments for those who had had studio and network gates slammed in their faces in the past or who’d never had the confidence or connections to go that far in the first place. – The American Conservative
“Believe it or not, this used to be a fairly common dining experience, offered by more than 100 such establishments in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.” There are still three left in the U.S., and CityLab visits the one in Mesa, Arizona, which has a Wurlitzer bigger than the organ at Radio City Music Hall. — CityLab
Graham Daseler: “The good news is that cultural appropriation is here to stay, no matter how many angry Twitter mobs come to kill it. Critics of the practice can’t even state their grievances without stealing the artifacts of at least half a dozen cultures. The expression itself is a prime example. The word “culture” comes to us by way of French, while “appropriate,” meaning “to take,” was plundered from Latin by Middle English. This, if nothing else, demonstrates how futile it is to try to stop the tsunami of culture or to build fences around it. There is nothing more human—or, one might equally argue, humane—than the desire to copy, emulate, and learn from people who are different from ourselves. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” – The American Conservative
“Some forewords are transitive: acts of seduction that are at the same time documents of earlier seductions. … Other forewords are parasitical; like cuckoos’ eggs laid in crows’ nests they hatch and flourish at the expense of their hosts. … As for prefaces (and afterwords), these may be explanatory, apologetic, triumphal, tendentious, rueful, score-settling, spiteful, bibliographic, theoretical (as is the case with Chandler’s), or gently embarrassed (as is the case with Cheever’s) but the best of them — like Cheever’s — are also what I would call restorative.” — The Paris Review
The board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “left intact Rule Two, the one that established that a film” — in...
