Every month, I share the articles and sites that I found most interesting. Here’s what caught my attention in May.
• Photographer Harold Feinstein, the unsung chronicler of Coney Island by Killian Fox: “While many of his contemporaries sought out angst, gloom and grit, Feinstein preferred to see the beauty and hopefulness of the world.”
• The Creative Future Report by 99U: “We asked more than 3,600 creatives what excites them, what scares them, and what they need in order to do their best work. Here’s what we found.”
• Start With This is my new favourite podcast: “a podcast gone creativity playground designed to put your ideas in motion, from the creators of Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor.”
• You can’t change your favorite pop culture — but you can change how you engage with it by Susana Polo
Creators owe fans respect for the audience’s emotional investment in the work. For example, it’s gauche for an artist to disparage their fans for being emotionally invested in their fiction, when the entire purpose of fiction is, and has always been, to create real emotions about a fake thing.
Anything past that is icing.
• Jack Kirby Created the Marvel Universe (and Everything You Love About Comics) by Birth.Movies.Death.: “The creator or co-creator of the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the New Gods, Jack Kirby is one of the most influential people who ever lived that many have never heard of.”
• Mother/Russia by Sara Fredman
The show not only gives us a wife who is smart, strategic, and quick-thinking, but it also allows that wife to be a stubborn and somewhat-absentee parent who is sometimes very, very wrong without losing her humanity and with it our empathy. The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.
• The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler: “Should a significant percentage of the population abandon these spaces, that will leave nearly as many eyeballs for those who are left to influence, and limit the influence of those who departed on the larger world they still live in.”
• New music from Shakespears Sister! I’m giddy. (The video for ‘Stay’ was a defining moment of my childhood.)
What’s the most interesting thing you saw online this month?
Reghan Skerry 