Getting an education

In a morning's worth of reading, I have learned that Oxford may have to set a minimum age for the students it accepts (thanks to Britain's new Children Act), a new high school in Arizona has abandoned textbooks for iBooks, identifying and analysing bullshit is serious business, academics are working hard to develop the next big search tool, The Apprentice is going to China, in-flight movies are tepid for a reason (though we already knew that), Canadians are spending more time on the internet than TV, Peter Pan is coming back, bigger and badder than before, films based on 19th century novels have heroines that are much prettier than their book counterparts, we shouldn't discriminate against people who don't read (including Posh Spice and Noel Gallagher), even though a quarter of Britons don't read, the great American novel for 2005 has yet to be written, the flood of great Indian writing has dried up (or maybe it's just Indians not living in India writing it?), DC Comics won't let an artist reinterpret Batman and Robin in a homoerotic fashion, artists have recreated modern art in Lego, Chicago contemplates building a corkscrew tower of Babel, and a British reality TV programme allows viewers to vote for Britain's most-hated building --- which will then be demolished.

I don't usually read that much of ArtsJournal's weekly newsletter, but this was a particularly meaty issue (for me, anyway).

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