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thehellsitenewsie · 1 month

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As theaters scramble to reach new audiences, three get $1 million each (NPR)

"Largely white, affluent, older."

That's Jacob Padrón's description of the traditional audience for Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., where he's artistic director. But that profile applies to other established regional theaters as well. "That was the demographic, that continues to be the demographic, but that's changing," he said.

Long Wharf is one of three theaters that's received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The other two are Portland Center Stage in Portland, Ore., and Actors Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Ky. All three are trying to reach new audiences in different ways — but that's not why they're getting these grants, said Stephanie Ybarra, program officer for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation.

#news #npr #united states #mellon foundation #theater #plays

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princetonuniversitypress · 5 months

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Listen in to the Ideas #Podcast and discover how #diversity is an essential strength that gives nations a competitive edge from Historian & Mellon Foundation Head Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor, Rutgers University Chancellor and Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

#Podcast #diversity #Mellon Foundation #Princeton University Press

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panicinthestudio · 9 months

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youtube

In Our Hands: Chinese Painting Conservators in US Museums, July 19, 2023

Whether carefully reinforcing the cracks in an ancient handscroll or remounting the portrait of an imperial ancestor, traditional Chinese painting restorers have cared for Chinese artworks in United States museums for over thirty years. Now focused on passing along their knowledge and skills, these dedicated artisans are training the next generation of art conservators to take on these responsibilities. Through in-depth interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of conservation studios in US museums, In Our Hands captures the generational, cultural, and educational shift taking place in the field of Chinese painting conservation. Produced by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art under the direction of Eros Zhao for Templux Films, this unprecedented documentary reveals the personal stories of nine conservators dedicated to preserving their traditional craft while advancing the field, an undertaking that is vital to the future of Chinese cultural heritage in the West. Filmed in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, this project was made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and through the efforts of people from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the University of Michigan's Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Dir.: Eros Zhao, United States, 2022, 50 min., English and Mandarin with Chinese and English subtitles) Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

#conservation #Smithsonian #National Museum of Asian Art #USA #Chinese #China #art #art history #preservation #Eros Zhao #documentary #University of Michigan Museum of Art #Metropolitan Museum of Art #Cleveland Museum of Art #Museum of Fine Arts Boston #Templux Films #Mellon Foundation #Youtube

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9jacompass · 1 year

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Apply Now: 2023 McCain Global Leaders Program For Young Leaders [Funded To The United States]

Are you a character-driven leader working to advance democracy, human rights and freedom? Do you want to gain experiential learning experience? Then apply for the McCain Global Leaders Program 2023. The program is designed to advance each Leader’s personal and professional leadership journey and impact by providing training, resources, and access to highly relevant regional and global networks…

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#Apply Now: 2023 McCain Global Leaders Program for Young Leaders [Funded to the United States]#Combatting human trafficking #Global Fellowship programs #Leadership training Train the Trainer #McCain Internship #Mellon Foundation #Next Generation Leaders program

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imadewritingmyjob · 10 months

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Father and son... Reacting to something... But what could make such normally imperturbable men be so openly disgusted?

Only one answer:

I swear that's all I could think about when drawing... XP.

Here, get the full meme experience.

#scp foundation #scp fanfiction #scp fanart #scp #another time #art #my art #base by mellon soup on patreon #o5-1 #dr gears #father and son moment of bonding over hating that asshole #meme parody

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krispyweiss · 2 years

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Mellon Foundation Gives $500K Grant to Noel Paul Stookey’s Music to Life Nonprofit

Noel Paul Stookey’s Music to Life nonprofit received a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish training programs for musicians working for social justice.

The grant will fund the nonprofit’s Accelerator programs, which help musicians turn their social-justice ideas into community-based realities.

“For these past 60 years, I have been a participating witness to the power of music to change lives,” Stookey, the middle name of Peter, Paul & Mary, said in a statement.

“This grant … confirms Music to Life's leadership role in mentoring the social-change artist’s transition from inspiring performance to constructive community engagement.”

Music to Life will launch its first national Accelerator Academy in early 2023 with more to follow.

Musicians dedicated to change are “often an overlooked resource for building more resilient communities,” Music to Life Executive Director Elizabeth Stookey Sunde said in a statement.

“Musicians in our network learn how to make a living while also making change,” she said.

More info here.

7/24/22

#music to life #the mellon foundation #noel paul stookey #peter paul and mary

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jcmarchi · 5 months

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450 Million-Year-Old Organism Finds New Life in Softbotics - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/450-million-year-old-organism-finds-new-life-in-softbotics-technology-org/

450 Million-Year-Old Organism Finds New Life in Softbotics - Technology Org

In collaboration with palaeontologists from Spain and Poland, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University used fossil evidence to engineer a soft robotic replica of a pleurocystitid. This marine organism existed nearly 450 million years ago and is believed to be one of the first echinoderms capable of movement using a muscular stem.

Pleurocystitid fossil and pleurocystitid robot replica. Image Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported research seeks to broaden modern perspective of animal design and movement by introducing a new a field of study — paleobionics — aimed at using Softbotics, robotics with flexible electronics and soft materials, to understand the biomechanical factors that drove evolution using extinct organisms.

“Softbotics is another approach to inform science using soft materials to construct flexible robot limbs and appendages,” said Carmel Majidi, the lead author of the study. “Many fundamental principles of biology and nature can only fully be explained if we look back at the evolutionary timeline of how animals evolved. We are building robot analogues to study how locomotion has changed.”

[embedded content]

With humans’ time on earth representing only 0.007% of the planet’s history, the modern-day animal kingdom that influences understanding of evolution and inspires today’s mechanical systems is only a fraction of all creatures that have ever existed.

Image credit: CMU

Using fossil evidence to guide their design and a combination of 3D-printed elements and polymers to mimic the flexible columnar structure of the moving appendage, the team demonstrated that pleurocystitids were likely able to move over the sea bottom using a muscular stem to push themselves forward.

Despite the absence of a current day equivalent, — echinoderms have since evolved to include modern day starfish and sea urchins — pleurocystitids have been of interest to paleontologists due to their pivotal role in echinoderm evolution.

Image credit: CMU

The researchers determined that wide sweeping movements were likely the most effective motion and that increasing the length of the stem significantly increased the animals’ speed without forcing it to exert more energy.

Now that the researchers have demonstrated that they can use Softbotics to engineer extinct organisms, they hope to explore other animals, like the first organism that could travel from sea to land — something that can’t be studied in the same way using conventional robot hardware.

“Bringing a new life to something that existed nearly 500 million years ago is exciting in and of itself,” said mechanical engineer and study co-author Phil LeDuc. “But we aren’t just looking at fossils in the ground, we are trying to better understand life through working with paleontologists.”

Source: NSF

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pittsburghbeautiful · 6 months

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Andrew Mellon

Andrew Mellon: The Financier, Philanthropist, and Political Figure of the 20th Century Andrew Mellon was a distinguished financier, philanthropist, and political figure who played a crucial role in the shaping of American fiscal policy during the early 20th century. He was respected for his financial acumen, which helped him build an extensive business empire. His considerable influence extended…

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jstor · 2 months

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We are pleased to share a significant milestone: JSTOR is now available free of charge in 1,000 correctional facilities worldwide, benefiting more than 500,000 incarcerated individuals. This accomplishment, made achievable through the generous backing of the Mellon Foundation, highlights JSTOR's steadfast dedication to promoting inclusive education.

Learn more about the JSTOR Access in Prison program.

#jstor #prison education #jstor access in prison

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aguacerotropical · 1 year

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i think there’s like one writer on this island who knows my grief bc she’s pretty much the only one who has read That Particular Poem and she’s so genuinely kind to me. Makes me cry

#idk other ppl are fake af and u kno they dont Get It #She does #for context our literary scene is four cliques funded by the mellon foundation who have all fucked and hate each other

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thejoyofviolentmovement · 2 years

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News/Announcements: JOVM Thanks Creatives Rebuild New York

News/Announcements: JOVM Thanks Creatives Rebuild New York @ArtsCRNY

The ideas behind Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) aren’t new — but the sense of urgency behind its implementation is very new: Inspired by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) Artists Project of 1978-1980, Creatives Rebuild New York is an extension of Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander’s work on the Governor Cuomo’s Reimagine New York Commission in 2021, created as a…

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#Creatives Rebuild NY (CRNY)#News/Announcements #The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation #The Ford Foundation #The Stavros Niachros Foundation #Tides Center

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 12 days

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This is just one of many ways that Republican oligarchs influence elections with their unlimited dark money. The Koch and Walton families will each spend about a billion dollars supporting every Republican candidate for office in a presidential election year. The Republicans have been doing this since the ‘60s with their political foundations. Democrats have nothing even close to this level of organization or funding.

There are dozens of other Republican oligarch mega-donors doing the same; Mercer, Crow, DeVos, Prince, Thiel, Leo, Mellon, Stephens, Navarro, Buckley, Brodie, Murdoch…all donating millions each and these are just some of the better known right-wingers. Many siphon money through right-wing political foundations to cover their tracks.

#Koch network #oligarchs #oligarchs influence elections #Neo-Nazi oligarchs elect Republicans #Right-wing political groups #Republican oligarch political foundations #right-wing dark money #your vote counts #republican assholes #traitor trump #crooked donald #traitor #maga morons #republican hypocrisy #republican values #resist #republican family values #never trump

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imadewritingmyjob · 10 months

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Afternoon gaming in the breakroom. Gears is winning. ("Mondays" Part 3)

#scp foundation #scp #scp fanart #dr gears #art #dr iceberg #charles gears #Let the boomer have fun on his nintendo #couple bonding over hobbies #my art #base by mellon soup on patreon

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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The Sacklers woulda gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darned meddling feds

The saga of the Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.

But there's an unexpected twist to this tale. After the Sacklers procured a sham bankruptcy that denied their victims the right to sue while leaving their fortune largely intact, the Supreme Court – yes, this Supreme Court – saw through the scam and froze the process, pending a full hearing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-opioid-settlement.html

The Sacklers basically invented modern, legal dope peddling. Arthur Sackler, the family's original crime-boss, revived the practice of direct-to-consumer drug marketing, dormant since the death of the medicine show, to peddle Valium. An aggressive and shrewd lobbyist, Arthur built the family fortune and, more importantly, its connections:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-sackler-family-built-a-pharma-dynasty-and-fueled-an-american-calamity/

A generation later, the family's business company created Oxycontin, and procured misleading and false research about the drug's safety kickstarting the opioid epidemic, whose American body-count is closing in on a million dead. Armed with inflated claims about opioid safety, the Sacklers' pharma reps bribed, cajoled and tricked doctors into writing millions of prescriptions for oxy.

This scam had a natural best-before date. As ODs flooded America's ERs and bodies piled up in America's morgues, it became increasingly clear that something was rotten. The Sacklers pursued a multipronged campaign to keep the truth from coming to light, and to keep the billions flowing.

On the one hand, they hired McKinsey to find novel ways to encourage doctors to keep writing prescriptions and to convince pharmacists to turn a blind eye to abuse. McKinsey had all kinds of great ideas here, including paying pharma distributors cash bonuses for every overdose death in their territory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids-settlement.html

When the issue of these deaths came up in public, the Sacklers blamed "criminal addicts" for their own misery, stigmatizing both people who desperately needed pain relief and the people who'd been deliberately hooked on the Sacklers' products. The legacy of this smear campaign is still with us, both in the contempt for people struggling with addiction and in the cruel barriers placed between people in unbearable agony and medical relief.

But mostly, the Sacklers kept their names out of it. They laundered their reputations by donating a homeopathic fraction of their vast drug fortune to art galleries and museums in a bid to make their names synonymous with good deeds.

The Sacklers didn't invent this trick. Think of the way that history's great monsters – Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford – are remembered today for the foundations and charities that bear their names, not for the untold misery they inflicted on their workers, their crimes against their customers, and the corruption of governments.

But the Sacklers made those Gilded Age barons seem like amateurs. They invented a modern elite philanthropy playbook that Anand Giridharadas documents in his must-read Winners Take All, about the charity-industrial complex that washes away an ocean of blood with a trickle of money:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

As part of this PR exercise, the individual Sacklers kept their names and images out of the public eye. For years, there were virtually no news-service photos of individual Sacklers. When journalists dared to criticize the family, they used vicious attack-lawyers to intimidate them into retractions and silence (I was threatened by the Sacklers' lawyers).

They also worked their media mogul pals, like Mike Bloomberg, who added their names to the "Friends of Mike" list that Bloomberg reporters were required to consult before writing negative coverage:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/29/friends-of-mike-enemies-of-the-people/#sacklerbergs

But Stein's Law says that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As lawsuits mounted, the Sacklers found themselves increasingly synonymous with death, not charitable works. But like any canny criminal, the Sacklers had a getaway plan.

First, they extracted vast sums from Purdue and shifted it into offshore financial secrecy havens:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded – and received – extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with trillions in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.

When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one's balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.

The Sacklers are a case-study in how a corrupt bankruptcy can be conducted.

Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.

First, they converted their victims' right to compensation into "property" that the Sacklers themselves owned. This transferred jurisdiction over these claims from the regular court system to the bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge – not a jury – would decide how much each of these claims was worth, and then what how much of that worth these victims (now recast as creditors) would be entitled to through the bankruptcy.

Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who'd undergone Senate confirmation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

These "coercive restructuring techniques" are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills – these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.

Three judges – David Jones and Marvin Isgur of Houston and Bob Drain of New York – hear 96% of the country's large corporate bankruptcies:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html

These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory "that casts the invention of the limited liability corporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity":

https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation's biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?

They cheat.

For example: when GM was facing bankruptcy, it argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem, and got in front of Judge Drain.

The Sacklers were – characteristically – even more brazen. They really wanted to get their case in front of Judge Drain, the nation's most enthusiastic supporter of "third party releases," through which bankrupt billionaires can wipe the slate clean, securing dismissals of all claims by the people they wronged.

Drain is also uniquely hostile to independent examiners, "an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate 'fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851339

If you're the Sacklers, hoping to keep two thirds of your billions and extinguish all claims by your victims, there is no better helpmeet than Judge Robert Drain of the Southern District of New York.

So, 192 days before filing for bankruptcy, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, New York (a company may claim jurisdiction in a specific court once they've operated a business there for 180 days).

Then they filed a bankruptcy in which they altered the metadata on their casefile, inserting the code for a Westchester county hearing into the machine-readable, human-invisible parts of the documents they uploaded to the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system (they also captioned the case with "RDD, for "Robert D Drain").

They chose their judge, and the judge obliged. UCLA Law's Lynn LoPucki is one of the leading scholars of these bankruptcy "megacases," and has written extensively on why these three judges are so deferential to corporate criminals seeking to flense themselves of culpability. She sees judges like Drain motivated by "personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase – very appealing to certain personalities."

Thus, these judges are "willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…"

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/02870w66d

This kind of judge-shopping goes beyond the Sacklers; the cases that Drain and co preside over make a mockery of the idea of America as a land of equal justice. "Prepack" and "drive-through" bankruptcies are reliable get-out-of-jail-free cards for capitalism's worst monsters: private equity firms.

Whether PE murdered your grandmother by buying her care-home and putting each worker in charge of 30 seniors:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/portopiccolo-nursing-homes-maryland/2020/12/21/a1ffb2a6-292b-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html

or poisoned your kids by filling your neighborhood with carcinogens:

https://www.webmd.com/special-reports/ethylene-oxide/20190719/residents-unaware-of-cancer-causing-toxin-in-air

limited liability wipes the slate clean.

30% of America's bankruptcies are private equity companies using the bankruptcy system to wipe away claims for their misdeeds, while keeping a fortune, thanks to the shield of limited liability.

Take Millennium Health, JamesS lattery's fake drug-testing company, which promised to help nursing homes figure out whether seniors were abusing (or selling) their meds by testing their piss for angel dust and other drugs. Slattery defrauded Medicare and Medicaid for millions, borrowed $1.8 billion (Slattery got $1.3 billion of that). He eventually walked away from this fraud after paying a mere $256m to settle all claims, and kept a fortune in assets, including the 40 vintage planes his private company ("Pissed Away LLC" – I am not making this up) owned:

https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

For the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor – or a noose. This is by design: judges who preside over elite bankruptcies speak of their protagonists as heroic "risk takers" and tiptoe around any consequences, lest these titans be chained to a mortal's fate, costing us all the benefits of their entrepreneurial genius.

PE companies helped the Sacklers design their own bankruptcy strategy, and it was a standout, even by the standards of Bob Drain and his kangaroo bankruptcy court. But now, the Supreme Court has pumped the brakes on the whole enterprise.

The judges ruled that the exceptions the Sacklers took advantage of were intended for bankrupts in "financial distress" – not billionaires with vast fortunes hidden overseas. In so doing, the court threatens all manner of corrupt arrangements, from "the Boy Scouts, wildfires and allegations of sexual abuse in the church diocese — where third parties get a benefit from a bankruptcy they themselves aren’t going through.”

The case was brought by the DoJ's US Trustee Program, which lost in the Second Circuit when it tried to halt the Purdue bankruptcy and argued that the Sacklers themselves had to declare bankruptcy to discharge the claims against them.

Now the Supremes have hit pause on the bankruptcy the Second Circuit approved, and will hear the case themselves. It's only one step on a long road, but it's an unprecedented one. Some of the country's filthiest fortunes are riding on the outcome.

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” tomorrow (Aug 12) at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Image: Edwardx (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpentine_Sackler_Gallery,_June_2016_05.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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