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Thursday, May 19, 2016

The Singing, by James Hughes, Slate

Behind the scenes as one of America’s most innovative opera companies adapts a Stephen King (and Stanley Kubrick) classic.

The Death Of The Great American Sporting Goods Store, by Chavie Lieber, Racked

From the rise of the casual camper to the boutique fitness boom, it can feel like there have never been more people in the market for sports apparel. As of 2015, sporting goods stores in the US were bringing in as much as $48 billion in annual revenue, according to IBISWorld, up from $39.8 billion in 2012. Sports participation is up, too. According toEuromonitor, participation in high school sports has increased from 25 percent to 35 percent over the last 35 years, with nearly double the number of female students playing sports as compared to the 1980s.

But there's a stark gap between an increasing customer base and many sports retailers — a gap that only continues to widen, no matter how many times companies see new ownership or rethink their businesses. As Hermina puts it, "My needs evolved, but in many ways, Sports Authority hasn't."

System Reboot, by Justin Evans, The Point

Most importantly, Allington et al. argue, DH has “tended to be anti-interpretive.” In place of the interpretation of literary texts, digital humanists “archive materials, produce data and develop software.” These are the entirely legitimate tasks of historians, computer scientists and social scientists, but they make DH an odd fit for a scholarly endeavor which, almost all teachers and students would agree, is focused on interpretation. Why should humanists be asked to do what can be done better by others? And why should they be asked to stop doing what they do so well? How, in short, did digital humanities come to be seen as the humanities at all?

Kafkaesque: A Word So Overused It Has Lost All Meaning?, by Alison Flood, The Guardian

But Merriam-Webster also admits that the word, which saw its first recorded use in English in 1946, “is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning”, a word that a columnist for Toronto’s Globe and Mail argued is “tossed around with cavalier imprecision, applied to everything from an annoying encounter with a petty bureaucrat to the genocidal horrors of the Third Reich”.