Tag: Nation

Dr Bruce Willett from the RACGP joins Steve Price to talk record highs of bulk billing and “doctor shopping.”

Published in the late 1940s, a decade after his death, the Italian volumes of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks started the process of his secular canonization. A founder of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci had spent 11 years in Fascist custody. During this period, while his teeth fell out and his health failed, Gramsci filled 3,000 notebook pages with reflections on anything and everything he believed was relevant to Italian history and politics, and the prospects for the left in Europe. To get past the prison censors, he did so in coded, sometimes enigmatic abstractions. In 1937, still in Fascist custody, he died never having seen one of his two sons. At the time, he was mourned by his Communist comrades but by few outside those circles, and certainly fewer outside of Italy.

Today, Gramsci is a household name; one no longer hears it pronounced as if he were Polish. In college courses devoted to intellectuals, or Marxism, or political theory, students routinely learn of his insistence that consequential political action happens in realms, like culture, that had not heretofore seemed politically consequential. In this scheme, intellectuals become particularly important for Gramsci—not because he thinks attention should be paid to noncelebrities as well as to the talking heads in mass media, though he does, but because, as he understands power, the work of intellectuals is essential both to maintaining it (from above) and to taking it (from below). And much of that work, which goes on outside of the limelight, involves listening and adapting to those who don’t share your cultural values or political goals. The exercise of hegemonic leadership—a leadership by consent—can never occur without some element of concession to those who are led. In emphasizing the role that culture and civil society play in politics, Gramsci was telling the left that it had to lead—or rule—in a social landscape that seemed alien to it and that could easily be dismissed, then and now, as apolitical and even toxic to genuine left-wing commitments. To an extent that remains remarkable, given that he lived under Fascism and we live under various styles of liberal democracy, his landscape has become ours.

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Live Nation is celebrating its National Concert Week by offering a slew of concert tickets — 1.5 million at 2,000 shows nationwide! — for just $20 all-in, no fees.

But if you find yourself perplexed by which shows are actually part of the deal, we feel you.

The initial concert list Live Nation distributed last week included dozens of tours that were passing through Tampa and Orlando this summer and fall. But not every tour and concert was going to be part of the deal. So which ones were? We had to wait until the deal’s launch this morning to find out.

Turns out a whopping three dozen Tampa Bay concerts were included — but good luck locating all those deals. The Live Nation site launched in conjunction with the promotion listed some shows with relatively tiny allotments of tickets, some of which went quickly.

At Amalie Arena, for example, the list included Maroon 5, Shania Twain, Kevin Hart, Daryl Hall and John Oates and Train, Journey and Def Leppard, and Game of Thrones in Concert. Within hours, the only show with $20 tickets remaining appeared to be Game of Thrones. Amalie spokeswoman Angela Lanza said the more popular deals likely sold out early.

At the Mahaffey Theater and Al Lang Stadium, on the other hand, all four events listed as part of the deal — Joe Biden, David Blaine, Lauryn Hill and Counting Crows — still had $20 tickets available, said Mahaffey spokeswoman Cindy Cockburn. (You won’t see them until you click through to the Mahaffey’s ticketing system, but they should be there.)

The one concert listed for Raymond James Stadium, Luke Bryan on June 23, only had tickets listed as low as $29.75 by late morning — and those were in the back row of the upper deck.

Kim Miale, Roc Nation Sports agent, discusses breaking gender records with her client’s placement in the NFL Draft and what she sees for the future of the sport.