Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump engaged in a spree of cuts to federal arts funding, alongside partisan assaults on national cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center, I found myself thinking about the Depression-era origins of government-funded art in the United States. During a time of economic and social strife, Washington responded by investing in the arts'even if it resulted in work that made some Americans uncomfortable. The Federal Theatre Project, an arm of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, may have been the closest thing the country ever had to a true national theater. From 1935 to 1939, it engaged out-of-work actors, writers, directors, and stagehands across the country to produce plays, many of them free, that toured the U.S. and were enjoyed by some 30 million citizens, a majority of whom had never seen a live play before. Yet the most American thing about the FTP might not have been its populist spirit, but rather its tumultuous demise. The project's more progressive features turned it into a hot-button issue in the Capitol. Some productions involved racially integrated casting; others advanced radical visions of the country's future, such as the possibility of a female president. Still others warned of the rapidity with which democracy could give way to dictatorship. In a dark American era plagued by Jim Crow and rampant poverty, the plays of the FTP tended to engage frankly with some of the grimmer American truths....
Many nonprofits face growing pressure from their donors and other funders to do more with less as their costs rise and their budgets don't keep up. One way these organizations are responding is by trying to save money on their staffing by hiring contractors, consultants and temporary staff instead of full-time employees. We are two nonprofit management scholars. We analyzed data collected from 2008-2018 that was drawn from 7,838 museums, theaters, community arts centers and other arts and cultural nonprofits across the country. As explained in studies published in two peer-reviewed journals around the same time, we identified a gap between the promise of flexible labor arrangements and their actual outcomes for arts and culture nonprofits. First, we assessed the nonprofits' operational performance using in-person attendance at theatrical performances, museum exhibits and other live events as a proxy for how well these nonprofits were delivering services and reaching their target audiences....
A singalong version of the Netflix animated film 'KPop Demon Hunters' is on-track to earn $18 million to $20 million in theaters this weekend, making it the number one movie at the domestic box office. And that's despite only being in theaters for two-thirds of the weekend (namely, Saturday and Sunday). This isn't the first time a streaming title has topped the box office charts. In fact, Apple's 'F1' (distributed in U.S. theaters by Warner Bros.) opened to an even more impressive $57 million earlier this summer. But this marks the first time Netflix has had the biggest movie in theaters. The victory comes with some asterisks, most notably that Netflix doesn't announce box office returns itself. So these aren't official numbers from the streamer, but rather preliminary weekend estimates from other industry sources. This was, admittedly, a quiet weekend, without major new releases. Besides 'KPop Demon Hunters,' the top-grossing movie was 'Weapons,' which made an estimated $15.4 million in its third weekend in theaters, for a $115 million domestic total....
Air travelers in America shall no more doff their chukkas, their wedges, their wingtips, their espadrilles, or their Mary Janes, according to a rule-change announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. It's been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration started putting people's footwear through its scanners, after a man named Richard Reid tried and failed to detonate his high-top sneakers on a flight to Miami in December 2001. Indeed, the requirement has been in place so long that my adult children, who were born just before and after the September 11 attacks, didn't even know its rationale. Feeling the cold airline-terminal floor through socks has been, for them, a lifelong ritual'as fundamental to the experience of flight as narrow seats and insufficient overhead bins. The TSA's mandate to go shoeless, like the volume limit on toiletry items (to thwart the assembly of explosives from liquids) and the need to remove laptops from carry-on bags (to better examine them for hidden threats), came to give the mere appearance of vigilance: not security but security theater. From the start, it provided newly federalized and uniformed TSA agents with stuff to do at every moment, and government officials with the chance to embrace 'an abundance of caution,' a stock idea that can transform almost any inconvenience into leadership. Now, by closing the curtain on the shoe requirements, Noem has indulged in a rival form of spectacle: populism theater. Her new policy gives citizens something they actually want, and something that has until this point been reserved for upscale travelers who pay for premium airport-security-hopping services. But with this week's change, the system hasn't really been democratized so much as made indifferent. In this case, the fact of the TSA's doing less'and caring less'just happens to be helpful....
