"He was among the first crop of foreigners picked to direct an Italian museum or cultural site as part of what was a contentious drive to revamp the management of the country’s heritage. Not only was he foreign but he was the youngest person in charge of a major site." - The Guardian
"Perhaps the industry’s biggest concern about the merger, especially among agents and authors, is what it will mean for book deals. An agent representing a promising author or buzzworthy book often hopes to auction it to the highest bidder. If there are fewer buyers, will it be harder for agents to get an auction going for their clients, and...
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrung meaning from time. Each day is so like the former. April disappeared entirely; Thanksgiving feels as close, or faraway, as last June. I no longer can keep track of the dates; time has become a pool of standing water. - Psyche
"The drive to create a more diverse dance curriculum and the aim to harness digital capabilities to prepare graduates for a post-Covid world means the way we teach dance needs to radically change, in order to better prepare graduates for the cultural landscape in which contemporary independent dance artists forge their career and which many of them go on...
"In 1974 Cook & Shanosky Associates, a design firm started by Mr. Cook and Don Shanosky a few years earlier, won a contract to develop a set of symbols that could be universally understood, and that would efficiently convey the kinds of information people in a public place might need. … The signage the two came up with, 34...
As sources for possible future scenarios capable of providing strategic foresight, or producing alternative future plans, novels can also help businesses create dialogue on difficult and even taboo subjects. Novels are, therefore, capable of helping managers become better, providing them with creative insight and wisdom. Science fiction can provide a means to explore morality tales, a warning of possible...
"It was not the 'alien' music that disturbed the Japanese audience" at the Tokyo premiere in 1914 (there had been a Western music school in the city since 1890), "but the threat to traditional hierarchies between men and women. Later, in the 1930s, feminist writers such as Ichiko Kamichika and Akiko Yosano criticised the opera for promoting a 'victim'...
No one could have predicted Stokes’s zigzag jazz life, including him. Born in D.C. in 1930, he was a teen obsessed with boogie-woogie records; then a student turned professor of Greek and Latin languages and literature and ancient history; then a turned-on-tuned-in-dropped-out hippie roadtripper; then a volunteer radio DJ; then a voracious music scribe who published his first jazz...
The Bach Cantatas Website, founded 20 years ago by Aryeh Oron, includes texts from Bach's sacred works in multiple languages, discographies, history and analysis of each piece, and many other resources. It gets 15,000-20,000 hits a day and is used even by the likes of John Eliot Gardiner and Masaaki Suzuki, two of the world's leading Bach conductors. -...
In 1936, George Orwell claimed that “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers” was causing the public to turn away from novels altogether. “Novels are being shot at you at the rate of fifteen a day,” he wrote in an essay, “and every one of them an unforgettable masterpiece which you imperil your soul by missing.” -...
Neuroscientist-turned-English-professor Angus Fletcher: "It's a machine designed to work in concert with another machine, our brain. The purpose of the two machines is to accelerate each other. … We've been taught in school to interpret literature, to say what it means, to identify its themes and arguments. But when you do that, you're working against literature. I'm saying we...
"This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense...
Alexis Soloski: "It’s recognizable enough that Portlandia and Saturday Night Live can parody it. It suggests intimacy, a rumpled authenticity. Because if someone were faking it, they would, like, definitely cut out the filler words and upspeak. I mean, right? But the most seemingly unstudied performances are often the result of relentless rehearsal and calculation. So I wanted to...
Even as media companies pour billions into the industry, "its formats and business practices are still developing, leading producers, executives and talent to view the medium as akin to television circa 1949: lucrative and uncharted territory with plenty of room for experimentation and flag-planting. … But along with the optimism come worries that big money may stifle the D.I.Y....
"With audiences and funders generally letting dancers decide what (and how much) to produce while distancing requirements are in place, the incentive to go virtual appears almost wholly self-imposed. … More than anything else, peer pressure is what led so many companies to produce so much content so early — setting a pace difficult to sustain as the pandemic...
