If You've Just Come To This Blog From The Guardian

I'm always pleased when the Guardian's online blog includes me in a recap of one of the theater-sphere's rolicking debates. Earlier today, they posted a recap of the debate around race sparked off by Thomas Garvey's response to RVCBard.

I just wanted to say two things, if you're just arriving now and missed it:

1. I responded to Isaac's charge, quoted at the end of the piece, that I was taking Thomas Garvey in good faith here.
2. One odd omission from the Guardian piece is RVCBard's stance on the issue, since after all it was her comments that Garvey latched onto and started the whole thing, and without her the issue would probably have died away much quicker and been less interesting. Anyways, this is her biggest response to the debate, and this is her last one. They're crucial to understanding what happened.

One Reason Theater Has It Better Than Television

Our actors are free from the terror of freeze-frame.

How We Connect

Regionally, according to an analysis of Facebook. You can find the tool they're using here.

(New Zealand's #1 like is Outrageous Fortune, which for a moment made me think they were super in to the terrible fate facing American Playwrights, but instead (and far more logically) it's a New Zealand TV Show.)

Anyways, the clusters of America tend to ring true, and it might be useful information when tackling figuring out how to decentralize the American Theater -- what networks are already out there?

(BTW - I would have though that all of New York's top 10 most connected regions would be other major metropolitans, but it's a mix between places like Los Angeles (its top connection) and Suffolk County, NY and Nassau County, NY. That seems like what you might expect, but compare to Washington D.C., whose closest major connection is Baltimore.)

Contribution to Createquity.com

I've said it before and I've said it again, I owe a lot of gratitude to Ian Moss. Ever since we first crossed paths on Twitter, he's been a solid friend of this blog and, I was thrilled when he first asked me to contribute to Createquity. He's a very studious editor and makes my reports something quite above the level of work I usually do on this blog, and it is always a joy to get to work on it with him.

Anyways, in celebration of Snowpocalypse/snOMG, my second contribution is now online - it's an analysis of the report The Search For Shining Eyes, which was a rather comprehensive investigation into how to reverse the wane of orchestras in America. Although its focus is on classical music, there's a lot that theater can take a way from it -- and some illuminating differences.

Anyways, go take a look. If you're interested, my previous contribution is here, along with a response to a response here.

Loss Aversion

Theater people - pay attention to neurology. I have no idea how people expect to create works that mirror the human experience without being at least somewhat invested in how we form that experience.

Anyways, this post comes from The Frontal Cortex (a great blog for this sort of thing), and is actually almost exactly what my next big theatrical project is going to be about. The subject is Loss Aversion:

The two different questions examine identical dilemmas; saving one third of the population is the same as losing two thirds. And yet, doctors reacted very differently depending on how the question was framed. When the possible outcomes were stated in terms of deaths⎯this is the "loss frame"⎯physicians were suddenly eager to take chances. They were so determined to avoid any alternative associated with a loss that they were willing to risk losing everything.

Kahneman and Tversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they might lose $20, they demanded an average payoff of at least $40 if they won. The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain. Furthermore, our decisions seemed to be determined by these feelings. As Kahneman and Tversky put it, "In human decision making, losses loom larger than gains."

Think about Loss Aversion, and then think about the 1% Doctrine, from one Richard Cheney:

If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.

Emphasis mine. Oh, and don't forget the rules of Terrorball:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

A Strange Article

A strange news story that stuck out to me (it's behind a pay-wall, so here's the important bits):

IQALUIT, Nunavut (Dow Jones)--European members of the Group of Seven nations told their counterparts that budget problems in Greece are "no matter" for the International Monetary Fund, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Saturday.

Speaking to reporters at the end of a meeting with top G-7 financial officials, Schaeuble said there was "no doubt" that the euro-zone members oppose any outside involvement in helping Greece to solve its problems.

"All our partners outside the euro zone have the firm impression that the Europeans will solve the problem and can deal with it and that we are aware of the problem," Schaeuble said. "But we have strongly and unanimously refused to discuss internal problems." To make that point, he added that Europe isn't discussing problems occurring in the U.S. state of California either.

I don't exactly know why this article struck me so oddly. I guess it's the strongest statement of territorial integrity from Europe I've seen yet. I've held that the slow process of the EU's birth and solidification has been like watching the US' Constitutional Conventions in slow motion -- watching a federation of states become a single nation -- but this is an interesting new take. I suppose this is a by-product of the new EU Constitution, stating that there's now one EU foreign policy and therefore things like the IMF have to go through Europe first.

I guess what really strikes me is that the State of California does not have any internationally recognized sovereignty, whereas as far as I know Greece still does. (side-note: the United States did want to give California some form of internationally recognized sovereignty during the very early days of the United Nations -- the USSR wanted each of its 14 Republics to be treated as separate states for the purposes of the UN's Security Council, and the US threatened that if that was the case, each of its 50 states would be given a vote on the council -- but I digress) I wonder how that statement played in Greece.

Diversity XXII: Meanwhile, In Literature...

Via Andrew Sullivan, Claire Messud writes about diversity in literature. Not an unfamiliar story:

Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.

And we don’t change our spots when we grow up. Last year, I was one of nine judges awarding an international literary prize for a writer’s body of work. Each of us nominated a candidate, and five of us were women; but only one of our nominees—only one out of nine—was female. (I myself enthusiastically nominated a man.) Our cultural prejudices are so deeply engrained that we aren’t even aware of them: arguably, it’s not that we think men are better, it’s that we don’t think of women at all. The absence of women from lists and prizes leads, then, to the future absence of women from lists and prizes. Now, lists and prizes mean nothing, of course; except that they inform curious readers about who and what to read.