Dispatches From the Culture Wars – February 25, 2025
Portside
It’s happening here, now
It’s happening here, now
It’s happening here, now
theater
As Off Broadway Crews Unionize, Workers See Hope, Producers Peril
New York Times
A unionization wave sweeping across Off Broadway is poised to reshape the economics of theater-making in New York — for workers as well as producers. Workers say the move is overdue....
books
Tony Kahn: Boy Fugitive in the Cold War
Portside
This is a poignant tale of remembering parents in trouble, careers dashed and of steady FBI harassment. The end is not happy, except that the boy survives and makes his own life as an admired cultural commentator on radio.
Tidbits – Dec.26 – Reader Comments: Trump’s Pick for Attorney General: Rapist Gaetz; Democrats’ Path Back To Power; Economic Populism Did Not Lose This Election; Second Ku Klux Klan; Stop Blaming People for Wanting To Afford the Basics of Living;
Portside
Reader Comments: Trump's Pick for Attorney General: Rapist Gaetz; Democrats’ Path Back To Power; Economic Populism Did Not Lose This Election; Second Ku Klux Klan; Stop Blaming People for Wanting to Afford the Basics of Living; Cartoons, and more...
poetry
Whosoever
Whosoever Whole
Poet Elizabeth Scanlon asks "what is this a culture of," and finds the usual answers wanting, leaving it up to the rest of us to make better choices.
Art Works: How Organizers and Artists Are Creating a Better World Together: A Review
Portside
We cannot pin our hopes on one election, person, victory. What we can do is dig in for the struggle ahead. Art Works provides a reminder of our history of art and activism, the inspiration of past struggles, and the tools for what lies in our future.
Malian Master Puppeteer, Yaya Coulibali: “Puppetry Is the Sum of the Collective Human Imaginary”
Equal Times
We Africans have to value what we have more and what we are, to value culture, something that is not tangible and cannot be bought and sold, like money.
Sunday Science: Signs of Science
Science
CyberTracker, software developed in collaboration with Indigenous trackers, is enabling almost anyone to collect complex biodiversity data
The Number of Religious ‘Nones’ Has Soared, but Not the Number of Atheists – and As Social Scientists, We Wanted To Know Why
The Conversation
First, what makes an individual more or less likely to identify as an atheist? Second, what makes someone more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview over time?
What Beethoven’s Ninth Teaches Us
New York Times
I don’t believe that Beethoven was interested in everyday politics. He was not an activist. He was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was concerned with moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong....
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