After a long and drawn-out challenge process, this week Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon finally prevailed in Franklin Township! The denouement to this extended drama came down to a special convening of the Franklin Township school board set for this past Monday evening (July 6th). No one knew how it would turn out. New members of the school board, whose [...]
We were gratified to learn of a kind mention last week from librarian Lizzy Burns in her thoughtful blog A CHAIR, A FIREPLACE & A TEA COZY concerning one example of the kind of work the NCAC does every day. You can find the original post here. The latest wrinkle in the story: Revolutionary Voices has been pulled from not [...]
In one of the more recent public controversies to hit the NCAC’s arts advocacy radar, two murals from a series commissioned for a Cincinnati Arts Center (CAC) exhibition were recently destroyed – one vandalized by unknown actors, the other whitewashed by a disgruntled site owner. The two murals, by former street artist Shepard Fairey (whose best known images include the [...]
NCAC recently fielded a plea for help from a Boston University student filmmaker, at the College of Communication, whose film Wake Up had been removed from regular class consideration and critique for reasons which depended very much on point of view. The student thought it was art. The faculty called it pornography. What was not in dispute was that the [...]
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court dealt a legal setback to supporters of “net neutrality.” The court ruled (Comcast v. FCC) that the FCC does not presently have the authority to control an ISP’s network management practices and therefore cannot require Comcast (one of a small number of powerful corporations whose networks comprise the Internet) to treat all internet content equally. [...]
Last summer, we reported that the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) were mounting a creative challenge to the constitutionality of gene patents, a questionable practice which till now was supported by U.S. Government policy. The US Patent and Trademark Office has regularly granted property interests in certain types of living organisms and their constituent parts, including genes, the [...]