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CultureDesk

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Welcome to Flipboard’s culture and entertainment picks. You'll find insightful interviews, revealing reviews and thought-provoking features. Posts are handpicked by Flipboard editors. Boosts do not imply endorsement, but are used to highlight posts we think the community might find interesting. #Culture #Entertainment #TheArts #Food

For more culture picks, follow Flipboard's federated Culture Desk (@theculturedesk)

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More than 400 formal balls are held in Vienna each winter carnival season in a tradition that dates back to 1814, with breaks only for the two world wars and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly every profession holds its own dance — some, such as the Hunters' Ball, have outlived the imperial-era jobs they were created to celebrate. For the Dial, writer Jessi Jezewska Stevens attended three balls to try and determine: "On a continent that relishes golden-era traditions yet finds itself slipping in the geopolitical world order, how do you face the future without romanticizing the past?"

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Saturday, June 22, would have been Octavia Butler's 77th birthday (the acclaimed writer died from a fall at age 58 in 2004). Artist Alison Saar has now created a collectible handcrafted edition of Butler's classic, genre-defying 1979 novel, "Kindred," in collaboration with publisher Arion Press. She and Arion creative director Blake Riley spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle about the process of creating the book, which includes 14 original linocuts and is made from a type of paper that Saar says, “looks like cotton that still has some seed and stem in it, the kind of leftover, rougher cotton that enslaved people would be allowed to keep to make their own clothes.”

https://flip.it/Z6sbmj

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Last night, Major League Baseball legend Reggie Jackson was asked in a Fox Sports show about how he felt about returning to Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., for a Negro League tribute game. The 78-year-old, who started his MLB career in Birmingham in 1967, did not hold back. He told interviewer Alex Rodriguez about his experience of racial slurs and being denied entry to restaurants and hotels, in a city where the Ku Klux Klan was committing attacks of racial hatred. Here's the story from NBC, including the full video.

https://flip.it/cvlXTF

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Eight years ago, a woman named Laurene asked writer Richard Kelly Kemick to finish her late husband's novel, a book he had planned to finish upon retirement from his career as a surveyor, but never got the chance. Out of embarrassment and naivety, Kemick accepted. "The hard part was already over —the labour of birthing an idea — and all I had to do was towel it off and spank a bit of life into it," he writes for The Walrus.

Here's more on his efforts to finish a dead man's novel and what he learned along the way. "The briefcase novel has taught me nothing about writing; it hasn’t taught me how to sculpt a sentence, how to develop character, not even how to craft a sex scene (from the notebook titled “Personalities”: “They made love, and she died.”). But the briefcase novel, and the surveyor who made it, has taught me everything about being a writer," he concludes.

https://flip.it/Yn6oEJ

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MLB will be honoring the Negro Leagues and the legendary Willie Mays with a televised game today at America's oldest ballpark, Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Als. Both teams will be wearing Negro Leagues uniforms — the Cardinals will wear St. Louis Stars kits, while the Giants will wear San Francisco Sea Lions jerseys. On June 17, the day before he died, Mays gave a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle about the game. "My heart will be with all of you who are honoring the Negro League ballplayers, who should always be remembered, including all my teammates on the Black Barons," he said. Here's more from TODAY about the history of Rickwood Field, preparations for the game, and how to watch it.

https://flip.it/-fDcKQ

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In honor of Juneteenth, the team at @EatingWell has curated this @Flipboard Storyboard of recipes, all of which have special significance for the holiday. The collection contains dishes created by South Carolina cook and activist Mabel Owens Clark and Jessica B. Harris, the culinary historian and living legend, and includes recipes made with traditional prosperity ingredients such as collards, rice, beans and corn.

https://flipboard.com/@eatingwell/20-recipes-to-celebrate-juneteenth-bm8tqbcob82pklsn

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Last year on Mastodon we featured this story from the BBC about Gladstone's Library, the U.K.'s only residential library. Fediverse folk were so enthusiastic that when we discovered the library is offering scholarships to be taken in 2025, we had to share the information (see the second link in this post for all the details).

https://flip.it/qKpUn7

https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/accommodation/scholarships

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Willie Mays died yesterday at 93. Our sports editor has curated this Storyboard of tributes to an American icon. "His extraordinary statistical accomplishments speak for themselves, but the grace, joy, energy and intellect with which he played the game allowed him to separate himself from other great players of his, or any, era," writes Lincoln Mitchell for @TheConversationUS.

https://flipboard.com/@thesportsdesk/willie-mays-the-loss-of-a-true-legend-kesbil0bq42nuagh

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Every fictional story exists in its own imaginary world because at least some of the events and people it describes didn't actually happen or exist. Novelist Patrick Nathan writes for LitHub about creating universes, layering fiction with texture, and navigating a novel's world.

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Five artworks will be removed from public view at the Kunsthaus Zurich museum in Switzerland in order to investigate whether they were looted by Nazis during World War II. The paintings are by Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Courbet and Toulouse-Lautrec, and come from the Bührle Foundation, which has been working with a provenance researcher for many years to determine the ownership history of the collection. Here's more from NPR.

https://flip.it/KaCQU5

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Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, where he met Daniel O'Connell, Ireland's nationalist leader and a vocal critic of slavery. “I am the friend of liberty in every clime, class and colour. My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island. No — it extends itself to every corner of the earth," O'Connell said at a meeting of his Repeal Association that Douglass attended in September 1845. Here's a look at how his words influenced Douglass's activism: "Agitate, agitate, agitate."

https://flip.it/kQCPtA

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Organ grinders have been a fixture on the streets of Mexico City since the 1800s, a result of dictator President Porfirio Díaz's passion for all things European. But nowadays, they're considered a nuisance — an assault against the ears. This, coupled with the high cost of renting and maintaining an instrument, means the tradition is at risk. Whitney Eulich talked to the remaining organilleros for @csmonitor. [story may be paywalled]

https://flip.it/TP_GTf

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Romance Writers of America (RWA) is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in part because of years of controversy surrounding race and inclusion. The trade association was founded by a Black woman in 1980 but became progressively whiter and less supportive of Black writers, awarded controversial books and in 2005, polled members on if romance should be defined as between one man and one woman. Despite all this, romance itself is thriving — it's the highest-earning fiction genre and sales are climbing. NBC took a look at what went wrong at the RWA. We want to know: What genres of book do you read (choose as many options as you like)? And if you're a writer, tell us about your work in the comments!

https://flip.it/3IWjL2

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"Black Barbie: A Documentary" produced by Shonda Rhimes, will be released on Netflix on June 19. TODAY shares this clip, featuring Kitty Black Perkins, the designer of Black Barbie, and Beulah Mae Mitchell, who worked on the production line at Mattel, remembering conversations with Barbie creator Ruth Handler. “(Handler) would say, ‘Do you have any suggestions?’” Mitchell recalled. “I was able to say, ‘We want a Black Barbie.’”

https://flip.it/j5y1hh

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Unflattering portraits of King Charles and Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart were all over the news last week, but these unusual depictions are nothing new. National Geographic analyzes images of Anne of Cleves, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and more to show how they added to mythologies and even changed the course of history.

https://flip.it/c2AF_s

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How do writers become famous? It's clear that talent is not enough. Cass R. Sunstein looks at the factors and trends that lead to literary recognition, from Oprah's Book Club to premature death. This extract from his book, "How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be," appears on LitHub.

https://flip.it/jjERwR

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70 years ago, the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education led to the desegregation of schools. However this also led to thousands of Black teachers losing their jobs. "Prior to 1954, there were about 82,000 Black teachers in the United States," write a team of academics for @TheConversationUS. "A decade later, with hundreds of segregated schools closing, more than 38,000 Black teachers had been fired by white school leaders." Read more about the importance of Black teachers and why 70 years after Brown, school educators are still mostly white.

https://flip.it/ijpFGJ

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For more stories like this, follow @ConversationUS's Politics and Society Magazine, @politics-society-ConversationU.

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What do you do when you're a happy camper but your partner is less keen on a night under canvas? Wally Byam's solution was to invent the Airstream, which started in the late 1920s as a wooden platform atop the chassis of a Ford Model T and by 1937 was a sleek aluminum-clad trailer marketed as "an airplane without wings ... luxurious in the extreme." Here, @Smithsonianmag looks at the origin and evolution of this American classic.

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Courtney Gore, the co-host of a right-wing online talk show, won a seat on a Texas school board on the basis that she would undo leftist indoctrination and get rid of educational materials with inappropriate messages about sexuality and race. Then she took office and actually read the curriculum, finding that the subject matter simply taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.” The Texas Tribune talked to her about why she ran for office, what she thinks is behind the push to take over school boards, and the backlash she's faced since speaking out against the ultra-right element of the Republican party.

https://flip.it/JY-7Pf

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The Turkish British writer Elif Shafak has published 19 books, many of which are bestsellers, and her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Yet she's also one of Turkish literature's most attacked authors, the victim of a campaign that started with fringe nationalist groups and has now been taken up by individuals associated with the ruling Justice and Development Party. Kaya Genç writes for The Dial about how this case is part of a wider trend in President Erdoğan's "new Turkey."

https://flip.it/gUUPny

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Alice Munro's death was announced yesterday. Her self-described "second oldest remaining friend and colleague," fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood, has written this tribute to her on her Substack, In the Writing Burrow. It's meant for paying subscribers, but a substantial portion is free to read.

"Alice could be quite mischievous, and not only in her writing. Both of us had dark curly hair at one time. We were about the same height.

"Alice: I was standing on a train platform and a man came up to me and said, ‘You’re Margaret Atwood!' 'Yes,' I said, 'I am.' Then we had quite an interesting conversation about your working methods and where you get your inspiration.

"Turn and turn about: After we both had white hair, and after Alice had won the Nobel, people would come up to me and murmur, 'Congratulations.' 'For what?' I would say. 'You know. Winning that prize.' After a while I stopped trying to explain, and just murmured back, modestly, 'Thank you.' Though the Thank Yous were really for Alice."

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Environmental historian Vicki Szabo and her team of archaeologists, historians, folklorists and geneticists are trying to figure out medieval Icelanders' attitudes to blue whales. Did they revere them as their protectors? Did they hunt them for food? Was it both? @hakaimagazine's Andrew Chapman reports on the work of this multi-disciplinary team, and what their findings might tell us about historical and modern whale populations.

https://flip.it/re1a4P

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For more stories like this, follow @hakaimagazine.

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Alice Munro, the Canadian writer, has died at age 92. In 2013, she became the first Nobel winner cited exclusively for short fiction — an achievement that came after her retirement from her 60-year writing career. Prior to that, she had won Canada's Giller Prize twice, then disqualified herself in 2009 to make way for younger writers. Ms. Munro “brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels,” the jury of the Man Booker International Prize declared in 2009, awarding her the prize for her overall contribution to fiction. Here's a tribute to her from the Globe & Mail. [Story may be paywalled]

https://flip.it/BN0BKb

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Until high school, Kate Feiffer believed that her mother Judy's novel, "A Hot Property," was about real estate. Then a boyfriend plucked the book from the shelves, started reading passages aloud, and revealed it was a piece of 1970s erotica. From then until just a few years ago, Kate considered "A Hot Property" to be her literary Waterloo — the book she'd hoped to conquer but never been able to. But on her mother's death, she picked up the novel and — between bouts of screaming and cringing — found something more thoughtful and reflective than she was expecting. Here's what she wrote for LitHub.

https://flip.it/cbERa2

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How did vitamins come to be called after letters of the alphabet? National Geographic's Erin Blakemore looks at the history and discovery of these vital dietary components, and why vitamin K bucks the naming trend.

https://flip.it/AMJIO1

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Rod Serling, creator of "The Twilight Zone," spent three years as a paratrooper during WWII, and was awarded both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He later said that his writing career helped him get the war "out of his gut." Shortly after he returned from the Philippines, where he was stationed, he wrote "First Squad, First Platoon," a short story which is being published for the first time today in The Strand. NPR spoke to his daughter, Jodi and his biographer, Nicholas Parisi, about the story and how it's connected to Serling's real experiences. To read "First Squad, First Platoon," you'll need to subscribe to The Strand.

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If you get intimidated by the dirty pigeons in your local park or town center, you may only have yourself — or at least, your ancestors — to blame. Snopes looks at the urban legend that humans originally domesticated pigeons to be companions and no pigeons cannot survive without humans, and finds it mostly true.

https://flip.it/dpRuhv

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The first board game printed in America was called "The Travellers' Tour." It described itself as a "pleasing and instructive pastime," and consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states, with numbered circles, and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities. The game used a teetotum — an alternative to dice but without the gambling connotations — and was based on players' memories and geographical knowledge. Here's @TheConversationUS's Matthew Wynn Sivils on what the game can teach us about the U.S. in the 19th century. Tell us in the comments what board games you recommend!

https://flip.it/_hCrrg

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For more stories like this, follow @ConversationUS's Arts & Culture Magazine, @arts-culture-ConversationUS

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The winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The New York Times took three: One for its coverage of the war in Gaza and others in the Features and Investigative categories. The Washington Post tied with wins in Commentary, Editorial Writing and National Reporting. The Fiction Pulitzer went to West Virginia writer Jayne Anne Phillips for her novel, "Night Watch," while the Nonfiction prize went to "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," by Nathan Thrall, which tells the story of a Palestinian father living under Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Here's the full list from NPR. This Poynter.org story has links to all the winning pieces of journalism.

https://flip.it/JD8UZ-

https://flip.it/.KYaqs

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"The pile beside my bed never shrinks; at the bottom of the stack are books I've been planning to crack open for months. My shelves remain full of lingering aspirations," writes the Walrus's Michelle Cyca. She looks at the problem of unread books, and the difficulty in offloading our libraries. What do you do with your unwanted books?

https://flip.it/aLVxC5

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Argentine writer César Aira follows neither the rules of literature nor of literary fame. His work has been translated into 37 languages, Patti Smith says he's one of her favorite authors and he's been named as a likely future Nobel Prize laureate. Yet he lives quietly in Buenos Aires and lets small presses publish his books for free. He rarely gives interviews, but made an exception for Alejandro Chacoff, who spoke to him for The Dial.

https://flip.it/wAyfiZ

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