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- Written by: Anne Wienbloch
On Halloween week, an op-ed titled “On Halloween, afterlife of a ghost dance” landed like a seasonal reminder that symbols don’t die so much as recur, rebranded and revalued with each return [8]. In the same cultural breath, the official posters for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics were unveiled, a ritual that fuses civic pride with the machinery of merchandising and myth-making [7]. And far from the trading floor, a look at what remains of Montreal’s Expo 67 asks the harsher question: after the spectacle, what stays, and who benefits [9]? These moments together form a séance of sorts, summoning the spirits that haunt artistic value: speculation, publicity, and the quieter pulse of public meaning. Today, I want to test the market’s mirror—how price chases attention—and sketch practical ways to align valuation with cultural enrichment.
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- Written by: Anne Wienbloch
Gizmodo’s headline—“Meet the New Characters of ‘It: Welcome to Derry’—Plus One Returning Stephen King Favorite”—arrived like a red balloon bobbing above our collective feed, cheerful yet ominous in what it signals about cultural appetite and investment priorities [6]. New faces promise fresh vantage points; a returning favorite promises continuity. But beneath the casting intrigue lies a more consequential question: are we nurturing the creative literacy required to turn genre revival into genuine social imagination? As another marquee franchise sets the cultural weather, it’s worth asking whether we’re putting resources into the next generation’s ability to read, remix, and responsibly reinvent stories—or just into pipelines that monetize attention. The fate of Derry’s kids has always been a parable about fear. The fate of our kids depends on whether we fund the courage to make meaning.
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- Written by: Anne Wienbloch
The reports are stark, the details devastating: a 29-year-old news anchor died after falling from the third floor of her home while trying to escape armed robbers, a story relayed across outlets and shoved into our feeds with the blunt force of catastrophe [1][9]. In the attention economy, tragedies arrive as push alerts and thumbnails before they become human again. As an art critic who studies how forms of seeing shape forms of feeling, I keep returning to a hard question: when our encounters with loss become increasingly mediated—wrapped in high-definition video, algorithmic curation, even “immersive” storytelling—do we deepen our capacity for empathy, or do we simply perfect the choreography of looking away? The answer depends less on technology than on intention, context, and whether the design of our cultural interfaces honors the person beyond the headline.
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- Written by: Anne Wienbloch
This week’s press note about iScreen’s full iOS 26 compatibility, bundled with “new creative features” and an “expanding global reach,” reads like a familiar drumroll for the tech‑culture parade [2]. It is an achievement worth acknowledging: compatibility is the plumbing that keeps creative practice flowing, and reach can widen audiences. But in 2025’s hype-bent attention economy, infrastructure announcements double as cultural positioning statements. They tell us not just what a tool does, but who it imagines as its makers, arbiters, and stars. If platforms want to be more than loudspeakers for the already‑loud, they must connect technical milestones to structural commitments, especially around recognition. Otherwise, “reach” becomes a megaphone that amplifies the same voices and mutes the rest.
