He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius,” physicist Lee Smolin has said), we’d be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand.
Male Dancers Need To Eat A Lot To Get The Energy To Lift Bigger Ballerinas, Says Mariinsky Theater’s Director
That would be Valery Gergiev, the general director of the storied St. Petersburg house as well as a compulsively globe-trotting conductor who’s found himself caught in controversy before. This time, in addition to opining on male dancers’ diets and female dancers’ size, Gergiev discussed the preference for small breasts on ballerinas and dissed the Mariinsky’s Moscow rival, the Bolshoi.
How Shakespeare Sucks Up All The Oxygen
“New theories about the extent of Shakespeare’s collaborative work appear to chip away at the solitary-genius monolith, but in fact they gain their intellectual and institutional traction from our very investment in that monolith. Adaptations similarly reinforce Shakespeare’s dominance even as they attempt to overwrite his social and linguistic conventions.”
Melbourne Symphony Turns Its Financial Fortunes Around
The orchestra, where a new managing director recently joined chief conductor Andrew Davis, “post[ed] a surplus of A$761,000 for 2016. The result is significant, as the orchestra registered a deficit of A$577,653 in 2015, and the previous surplus in 2014 was only A$298,770.”
BBC To Produce First Period Drama With All Non-White Cast
“A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth’s sprawling novel set in post-colonial India, … will be adapted into a lavish eight-part series with a script from Andrew Davies, the screenwriter whose hits include the famous 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and last year’s adaptation of War and Peace.”
The Pursuit Of Happiness – At An Actual Happiness Summit Conference
A “consciousness lecture,” an “intention experiment,” electronic “personal meditation assistants,” and the MIT Mood Meter: a reporter visits the first-ever World Happiness Summit in Miami.
Man Slashes $3 Million Painting In Aspen Gallery
In an apparently pre-planned attack following several suspicious phone calls, an individual wearing a hat, sunglasses and one glove entered the Opera Gallery, went right up to Christopher Wool’s Untitled 2004, cut it twice, and jogged out – all in about 15 seconds. (includes security video)
Amazon And EU Settle E-Book Antitrust Case
“Amazon, the biggest e-book distributor in Europe, proposed to drop some clauses in its contracts so publishers would not be forced to give it terms as good as those for rivals. Such clauses relate to business models, release dates, catalogs of e-books, features of e-books, promotions, agency prices, agency commissions and wholesale prices.”
Designing An Online Tool To Demystify Contemporary Dance For New Audiences
Audience engagement researcher Ben Walmsley writes about his project called Respond, “a responsive online platform … [which] attempted to break down cognitive barriers to dance by showing and explaining the rationale behind certain choreographic decisions and giving audiences demystifying insights into the rehearsal and development processes.”
What Kind Of Theatre, Exactly, Do ‘We Need Now More Than Ever’?
Broadway this season has pure escapism, like “Hello, Dolly,” and socially engaged theatre, exemplified by Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat.” The problem isn’t either one, argues critic Jonathan Mandell. “Escapist fare is most irksome not when it focuses on something other than the world’s concerns, but when it demonstrates an active indifference to those concerns.”
Economist William Baumol – Author Of Cost Disease Theory Widely Cited In Arts Economics
In the 1960s, Baumol was trying to understand the economics of the arts, and he noticed something surprising: Musicians weren’t getting any more productive — playing a piece written for a string quartet took four musicians the same amount of time in 1965 as it did in 1865 — yet musicians in 1965 made a lot more money than musicians in 1865.
The NYC Public Library Currently Blocks 225,000 Kids From Checking Out Books. Should It?
“In their 2015 public tax returns, the city’s three independent library systems, the New York Public Library, the Queens Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, reported collecting a total of $5.5 million in fines. Just as adults discover they cannot renew their driving licenses if they have too many unpaid tickets, children discover that they lose library privileges if they rack up more than $15 in late fees. The library is the Department of Motor Vehicles on training wheels.”
The Library Of Congress’s Porn Collection (And How It Came To Define Obscenity)
“Libraries will often have a restricted collection—a locked case, a unit of shelving behind the circulation desk, or a special room—that requires readers to obtain permission from a librarian to view the books within. Very often the restricted materials contain explicit adult content or valuable illustrations. During and after World War II the Library of Congress held one of the largest collections in the world of this kind, composed mostly of erotica and items considered to be pornographic or obscene.”
Ticket-Pricing Strategies? The Scottish National Orchestra Has Figured It Out To Audience Goals
“Working in a multi-city and multi-venue environment requires an approach to pricing that is adaptable in the different marketplaces in which we operate. Pricing is therefore viewed as a flexible tool that helps us achieve the central and multiple imperatives of the organisation: generate revenue, encourage attendance, reach new audiences, offer new experiences and promote the artistic reputation of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. To translate these imperatives into tangible tactics, our pricing strategy focuses on the simple question: How do we want our audiences to behave? We have identified five behaviours.”
From Phone Sex To The Oscars – The Irrepressible Gabourey Sidibe
On her start after filming “Precious”: “Phone work paid well, but she quit to play Precious. Money was tight after the film wrapped; she was paid scale, about $2,500 a week, but it took a month for her to receive her first check. After “Precious” made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, Ms. Sidibe experienced fame without fortune, riding subways and buses to red carpet events. Life at home was still precarious. On the morning of one event, her landlord tried to evict the family for what turned out to be a clerical error. Her income that year was about $50,000, just under half of which was from the phone-sex work — and almost double what her mother made, earning Ms. Sidibe head of household status on the family tax returns, a position that made her anxious.”
What’s All The Fuss Over The .Art Domain Name?
The pitch is that .art instantly creates an identity aligned with the art world; you can see plainly why Apple Inc. rushed to register iphone.art and facetime.art, among 36 domain names. During the preferred access period, which launched in December, more than 2,000 domains were purchased on .art by cultural organizations, as well as tech companies, luxury brands and banks. Instagram.art, Rolex.art and Beyonce.art were all snatched up. Ditto: .art domains for the Louvre, Tate and Centre Pompidou. Mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth celebrated its 25th anniversary with a special .art micro-site.
How The Feds Saved Literature In Tennessee
“This is the tale of how Tennessee literature was saved from a fate closely resembling oblivion by an unlikely hero: the United States government. Specifically, it was saved by the tiny portion of the US federal budget allocated to the National Endowment for the Humanities. More specifically, by the even tinier part of the federal budget that the NEH budget disburses to Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the national agency. The knight in shining armor who swooped in to save literature, it turns out, was Uncle Sam.”
Benjamin Millepied To Direct His First Movie
The director of L.A. Dance Project (and former director of the Paris Opera Ballet) will make a music-and-dance adaptation of Carmen, with the heroine crossing the deserts from Mexico to Los Angeles.
Biggest Podcast Ever? ‘S-Town’ Has More Than 40 Million Downloads In 30 Days
For comparison, the previous titleholder, S-Town‘s older sister Serial, averaged 4 million downloads per episode in the same time frame, and its studio grandparent, This American Life, gets around 2.2 million downloads each week.
How Hollywood Special Effects Production Was Outsourced To Far-Flung Corners
For Hollywood’s VFX workers, it’s easy to be nostalgic for a time when movies were made entirely in their own backyard. When I met with Squires in a Studio City coffee shop, he told me about making “Close Encounters” in two buildings, just one block apart, with Spielberg dropping in each week to check on the progress of different parts. Today’s business model is far more complex: The brain directing most of the action may be in one place (usually Los Angeles), but different arms are distributed around the globe, managing various shots, scenes and characters. Having all the world’s vendors to choose from allows movie studios to mix and match different VFX houses like “flavors of ice cream.”
How The Old Vic Has Reinvented Itself After The Kevin Spacey Era
“We needed to devise a way of working that didn’t rely on either a subsidy or the star power supplied by Spacey. What producing model would allow the Old Vic, a £13 million turnover break-even business, to continue generating its own work, and to stay solvent?” Old Vic executive director Kate Varah writes about how she, artistic director Matthew Warchus, and their colleagues found the way.
‘Enough Is Enough’: Gustavo Dudamel Makes Strongest Statement Yet About Venezuelan Crisis
After years of strenuously avoiding any public statement about the ever more dire political situation in his homeland, the star conductor last week gave a strenuously evenhanded plea for both sides to settle their differences – whereupon both sides attacked him. Now, after a young musician was shot while protesting, Dudamel has directly called on “the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people. … Democracy cannot be built to fit the needs of a particular government or otherwise it would cease to be a democracy.”
This Is The Most Powerful Woman In The New York Art World, Says The New York Times
“At 63, [she] has been running an art museum in New York longer than anyone except Glenn Lowry at the Museum of Modern Art. … She is one of only two directors in the city who has overseen the construction of a brand-new building. … And she is now in the midst of an $80 million capital campaign to double her museum’s size, a project notable at least so far for its sotto-voce nature, in sharp contrast to the expansion Mr. Lowry is overseeing.
David Lang Creates A Symphony For 1,000 Broken School Instruments
“The School District of Philadelphia has over 1,000 broken musical instruments, from flutes with bent keys to trombones missing slides. Some of their fixes are easy, others complex, yet due to funding cuts in the city, the district doesn’t have a budget for either.” But a Temple University professor had an idea for making music with them as-is, using that as a way to raise money to start fixing them.
End Of An Era: Brooklyn Academy Of Music’s Longtime Executive Producer To Retire
“It is time for the next wave to roll in at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Joseph V. Melillo, who has helped shape the academy’s cutting-edge aesthetic for more than three decades, will announce on Friday that he plans to step down as executive producer at the end of 2018. Mr. Melillo, 70, is the last link to the organization’s impresario and visionary leader, Harvey Lichtenstein.”