“He puts his ear to my chest and listens to my heart and counts the beats. ‘Sixty-two,’ he says with a satisfied smile, and I can’t imagine anything more intimate.” Bill Hayes, partner of the late neurologist and author, shares snippets from the diary of their life together that Sacks convinced him to keep.
Why Great Critics Are Sometimes Wildly Wrong
“So how does it happen — how can someone on the order of Voltaire (we can insert many other illustrious names here) end up missing the mark so completely? We first need to dispense with the most obvious and least savory explanation, that the nasty judgment is directed more toward the writer than his or her work.”
How A Writer Can Be Harrowing Without Giving Her Soul Away
Finding essays outside one’s personal experience “would be work that was harrowing in another sense of the word, which originally referred to preparing fields for planting by breaking up the soil. A true harrowing essay would dig deeper, ultimately performing a generative function.”
Buy A Discounted Ticket To Leave For A Stranger, Says Venue In Rome
“The initiative will run for just over two weeks at the Teatro delle Muse, where people buying tickets for a variety show will be able to purchase an extra seat at a reduced price to leave at the box office for someone else.” It’s based on the old Naples tradition of “caffe sospeso.”
The Very Messy Story Of The ‘Apocalypse Now’ Video Game
Three weeks ago, a Kickstarter campaign started for crowdfunding a game version of the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam epic, blessed by Coppola himself. But the project started about eight years ago at a video game studio called Killspace, which one former employee told reporter Adi Robertson was “the worst-run company you could possibly imagine.”
Painters In Search Of The Perfect “Red” Formula
“On walls, canvas, wood, or parchment, the música of reds was always more pregnant, more cadenced, and more resonant than others. Moreover, painting treatises and manuals are not mistaken; it is always with regard to red that they are most long-winded and offer the greatest number of recipes. For a long time, it was also the chapter on reds that began the exposition on pigments useful to painters.”
How Do You Edit Animation? The Opposite Of The Way You Do Live-Action
“Animated films have editors just like live-action films. But how do you edit an animated film? In live action, you shoot first and edit later. In animation, you edit first and shoot later.” Andrew Saladino explains in a video essay.
Ballet Training Really Can Harm Your Mental Health: Study
“While the advantages – including physical conditioning and the instillment of such welcome habits as discipline and cooperation – are clear, so are the dangers.” (For instance, the increased risk of eating disorders.) “That suggests dance training may produce or exacerbate some less-than-healthy psychological pressures. New research from Portugal finds evidence of just such a dynamic among young ballet students.”
A New App Hopes To Get Readers Hooked On Serialized Fiction
Radish “calls its [business] model ‘episodic freemium,’ which is basically a fancy way for saying the first chapter is free, and bookworms pay a small fee for each additional installment or chapter they choose to read.” And the authors will actually get a decent cut of those fees.
How Matt Haimovitz Broke His Antique Cello’s Neck (And What Happened Next)
He says he’ll never think of the Poulenc Sonata in the same way again.
Bankrupt Big Apple Circus To Return After Purchase By White Knight
A corporate restructuring firm paid $1.3 million for the company at a bankruptcy auction, and the show will go on this fall, celebrating Big Apple’s 40th anniversary.
In The Age Of Personalized AI, Are Teachers Becoming Obsolete?
“Developments in education technology promise to assist teachers and school systems in supporting struggling students by providing individualized instruction. But at what cost? As a teacher, it’s difficult to adapt to and embrace a machine that—at least for part of the time—takes over for me. The processes of teaching and learning are complex and innately human; I value the time I take to develop relationships with my students. But it’s hard not to wonder if that time could better be spent with adaptive learning technology.”
Microsoft Calls For A Geneva Convention For Digital Protections
“Just as the Fourth Geneva Convention has long protected civilians in times of war, we now need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace. And just as the Fourth Geneva Convention recognized that the protection of civilians required the active involvement of the Red Cross, protection against nation-state cyberattacks requires the active assistance of technology companies.”
Exploring The Guggenheim Building As A Stage And Musical Instrument
“For this piece, the first that the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim has commissioned for the rotunda (as opposed to the museum’s theater), the interior architecture serves not just as a stage for movement but also as a musical instrument. Those sticks were tuned plastic tubes known as Boomwhackers. The performers were drumming a melody.”
Grammys Boss: We Don’t Have A Racism Problem
“I don’t think there’s a race problem at all. Remember, this is a peer-voted award. So when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity—it’s the 14,000 members of the Academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry. It’s always hard to create objectivity out of something that’s inherently subjective, which is what art and music is about. We do the best we can. We have 84 categories where we recognize all kinds of music, from across all spectrums. We don’t, as musicians, in my humble opinion, listen to music based on gender or race or ethnicity.”
‘Newsies’ – It’s Not Just A Disney Show, It’s A Call To Resistance
Cassie Tongue argues that, in the age of Trump, the musical about striking newsboys in 1899 New York is newly relevant – “urging grassroots action to organise, protest and agitate for change, and emphasising the importance of a fearless fourth estate.”
That Study Saying Hip Movements Make People Think Women Are Good Dancers? It’s The Very Model Of A Bogus Science Story
“This is just the sort of science story that shimmies to the top of newsfeeds. That is to say, it’s of little consequence, and it’s very likely wrong. Those two traits aren’t unrelated.” Daniel Engber gives us the debunking.
Ann Powers: Why (And How) The Grammys Are Racist
“Here’s the hard part when it comes to popular music. Pop is fun — it helps people relax and temporarily abandon their inhibitions, to express hidden parts of themselves and to open themselves up to others, including others fundamentally different from themselves. The music industry relies on the fantasy that pop is welcoming to all — to anyone who’s willing to buy a record (now a download or a streaming service subscription) or a concert ticket. Yet this is, in fact, a dream that’s often contradicted by reality.”
A ‘Handsome Valentine’ To George Bernard Shaw From An Unrequited Love
“The hand-painted card he had received showed a procession of pre-Raphaelite maidens worshipping at his shrine, his noble profile floating on a banner among the trees over their heads. It had been sent anonymously, but he knew instantly who it was from: May Morris, the daughter of his great friend William Morris, the socialist author, artist and designer.”
The 1950s Computer That Generated Love Letters
In the summer of 1953, Christopher Strachey, a colleague of Alan Turing at the University of Manchester computer lab, wrote a program that made the lab’s Ferranti Mark 1 mainframe churn out love letters according to a template (e.g., “you are my [adjective] [noun]“). Beginning eight years ago, artist David Link constructed a model of the old computer and started running Strachey’s software (if that’s the word) once more.
The New York Times Tells You How To Navigate A Museum
Now this is service journalism! First of the paper’s four suggestions is “Set a Time Limit and Eat Before You Go”; the last is “Consider a Private Guide.” These suggestions were offered by the founder of a company that provides patrons with private guides for museums.
Fort Worth Opera Fires Its General Director
Scott Cantrell writes: “By any measure, Woods has transformed Fort Worth Opera from a struggling local company to one attracting national and even international attention for creative boldness and increasingly sophisticated productions.” FWO board chair Mike Martinez told Cantrell, “To be able to focus on development, business management, fundraising beyond Tarrant Country or North Texas – we just need somebody else in that regard.”
Naked Ladies Are Back: Playboy Ends Its Nudity-Free Experiment After A Year
Chief creative officer Cooper Hefner: “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”
San Antonio Symphony Hacked, Staffers’ Data Compromised
The hackers stole names, addresses, W-2 forms and other information for about 250 full- and part-time employees.
Merce Cunningham Is Now Fodder For Art Museums
“No choreographer in history has so naturally prompted museum exhibitions as Merce Cunningham. For more than 65 years, his form of radical dance theater was a vehicle for historic artistic experimentation, with brave breakthroughs of color, idiom, content.” Alastair Macaulay visit the new (and large) Merce exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.