About four months later, on August 29, 2008, The Curator launched, supported by International Arts Movement. We soon attracted a devoted readership and a wide range of contributors as we covered everything from video games to sports to visual art to tea.

Many magazines have a carefully cultivated voice and audience; The Curator has thrived on cultivating individual voices. Some editors assign articles; The Curator‘s offerings are almost exclusively driven by the delight and interest of its contributors.

Along the way we’ve met challenges and started paying a tiny pittance to our contributors. We’ve gone through a redesign, lost and added staff. I spent two years turning out the weekly edition – we haven’t missed a week! – and have been delighted to see readership spike, with tens of thousands of unique visitors each month.

Earlier this year I was offered a full-time position teaching writing at a tiny private college with big dreams in the Empire State Building. It soon became clear that this was the right place for me, and I knew I’d have to move on.

When I was thinking about the possible next editor for the magazine, I knew a few things were important. This editor had to be a talented lover of words. The person should be a cultural omnivore with an insatiable curiosity about the world – not just what’s in the mainstream, but not exclusively holding to esoteric tastes. And ideally, the editor would be in a cultural center outside New York City.

My friend Natalie Race rose to the top of the list immediately. I had the great pleasure of hanging out with Natalie when she spent a year interning with IAM in New York. She is a woman of great taste and intelligence, and is constantly exposing me to new bands and books I’ve never heard of. She recently moved back to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she’s helping to launch the dynamic New City Arts Initiative (along with other friends, former IAM interns, and Curator contributors). And she was crazy enough to come on board with this fledgling, upstart publication.

I’m glad to call Natalie my friend, and even more excited that she’s here to take the magazine through its next phase of growth. But she won’t be doing it alone: the very talented and capable Meaghan Ritchey will be continuing as managing editor, and Jenni Simmons – one of our original staff writers – will continue as assistant editor.

A more capable editorial team I could not imagine, and so I know I leave the publication in good hands. I’ll still be around, popping in and out, but I’m excited to see where this little, crazy dream – hatched over a lukewarm cup of coffee on an early morning – will go.

Nearly two years ago, The Curator published its first issue with an audacious goal: to uncover and celebrate great culture, and to grapple with the zeitgeist. Nearly a hundred editions later, we’re still doing that every week.

One area we’ve addressed is cities and neighborhoods – how people live in them, how we get around in them, how they develop, how residents can make a difference. We’ve talked about “agriburbia” and the boutique city conundrum. We’ve celebrated pizza in Atlanta, an after-school program in Chicago, and a park in Manhattan. We’ve had not one, but two odes to Houston, a photo tour of Inverkip, Scotland, a guide to London, and a recent tour of a Toronto neighborhood. We’ve even contemplated how to leave the city.

Clearly, our writers are passionate about places. And while some people probably settle into an area by default, we’d like to think our readers are savvier – that they live in their town, city, neighborhood, suburb, or rural area because they love it, or have come to love it.

And now, we want you to share that love with us.

In the next several months, we’d like to run articles by readers about what makes their place worth living in. What places do you frequent – and why? Is your local cheesemonger awesome? Does the park down the street reflect the values of your community in a fascinating way? Where’s your favorite place to while away a rainy afternoon?

Write about 600 words (you can get longer, but don’t go past 1200 words). Include links and pictures, if you’d like. And send it all to editor@curatormagazine.com.

But there’s a really fascinating instance of what you’re talking about in Chuck Klosterman’s new book [Eating the Dinosaur]. I feel like this is a really weird example to bring up, but he interviews me and Errol Morris about interviewing. It’s a really funny chapter because I give all of these totally Pollyanna answers—I mean, things I really believe, but I’m like [here he goes into an earnest falsetto, like a very sincere Chipmunk] “I just think that people open up because they sense that somebody’s really interested. It’s just a natural human thing.” And Errol is like “I DOUBT WHETHER WE KNOW OURSELVES, AND THE ACT OF BEING INTERVIEWED IS AN ACT OF ASSERTING A SELF WHICH WE HOPE IS TRUE.” Seriously, every answer is like this. I’m like, “I just think it’s really swell being interviewed!” And he’s like “THERE IS NO SELF.”

 

But anyway, afterward, they contacted Errol and me to ask if we would say our quotes into a microphone for the book on tape. Errol said “Sure,” and then when he saw one of the quotes, he said, “No, I meant the opposite of this. I may have said these words, but I actually meant the opposite.” This happened at the very last minute and it was really hard to figure out what to do, because it was a really beautiful quote, and then there’s Errol saying that it’s wrong, that he doesn’t stand by. And then Klosterman has to write around that, and it’s all in the chapter and it’s fascinating. But I don’t know why I’m wasting your time on this.

For more than a decade, the indie film movement centered in New York flourished, at times almost eclipsing the output of the mainstream Hollywood studios in terms of impact and accolades. But the financial collapse and the credit crisis had a deep impact on all of the movie world, which has responded with fewer expensive releases and safer bets.

And that new austerity has decimated the indie film business, ending with the collapse or downsizing of distributors like New Line Cinema, Picturehouse, Warner Independent Pictures, ThinkFilm and Miramax, all in the last few years.

“The world is different now,” Richard Abramowitz, a new-wave film distributor, said last week. While he expressed regard for the Weinsteins, he said of the possible Miramax purchase, “I don’t see it as the kind of game-changer it might have been a few years ago. And I’ll probably get chased down the street for saying that.”

Infographic junkies who love public radio’s This American Life should also check out This American Graphic.

They were a lively group of students, and we chatted for an hour, discussing topics we were all interested in. They asked smart questions.

When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that moment, they morphed from T-shirt-clad physical specimens and became generic graduate students, indistinguishable from all-in-black, cigarette-smoking studiers of literary theory and bearded-and-geeky future scientists. It’s all we do, they wailed, and it’s hard.

What’s hard?

The journal articles he makes us read (they said, directing accusing fingers at my colleague) are dense and boring. We’re getting good information, but it can be painful. And, they said, we have to learn to write like that.

No, I said, you don’t.

A group of the UK theatre world’s leading industry bodies – The Society of London Theatre, Theatrical Management Association and Independent Theatre Council – have recently come up with what they believe is a completely new way of measuring the effectiveness (or otherwise) of a theatre production.

Instead of relying on box office figures, social monitoring or critics’ reviews, the group have designed a system which aims to assess the quality of a show based on an audience’s emotional response.

It takes the form of a questionnaire handed out to audiences after a production, which asks questions along the lines of whether they felt challenged, moved or engaged by the show and whether they noticed time passing during it. The answers are then brought together to give an overall measurement of the audience’s response, in the form of a graph. Broadly speaking, the larger the area covered on the graph, the more successful the show has been.

Whatever the desire, I read so much that eventually my parents forced me to go outside and play, and they talked to each other—and I overheard—of taking me to a child specialist to see if there was anything wrong with me.  And still I devoured books, increasing the real estate inside me where I could find a place of my own, where my heroes always managed to slip away from disaster.

Benton goes on to criticize both professors who offer such encouragement to their would-be graduate students, and graduate students themselves for their “angry and incoherent” responses to his critique. While I understand that he and his ilk may be trying to help, I’m still confused about how they mean to do so—particularly with regard to those of us who did not benefit from their wisdom before embarking on our grad-school enterprise—since they largely fail to offer any meaningful solutions, or the ones they do are cavalier (for example, calls for graduate unions that garner little commitment from tenured faculty members).

Such pundits need to do what we TA’s tell our composition students to do: Offer potential solutions for the problem at hand. Writing the same meandering, pointless first draft of an argument does not constitute a valid contribution to the work of finding solutions. While our profession regularly excoriates the news media for overblown rhetoric, we seem to be better at articles that induce panic about our prospects than about, for example, jobs outside academe for which we might be suited. Just because we may not all get jobs at research institutions doesn’t mean we can’t contribute, and make a reasonable income to boot.

Celebrity readers always claim to enjoy only the highbrow, but real life bedroom tastes are a little more cosmopolitan. So no fibbing, what’s on your bedside table?