“I am thinking fast; new fears flood in at the speed of perception. I’m noticing some things you – the interviewing doctors – do not. Yes hallucinations, some of them; fight or flight is also heightening my senses. Paranoid hypotheses are disproved and discarded, others take their place. Some will stay with me for months to come. But I don’t know that there is any future. … The thought, ‘I’m experiencing psychosis’ – terrifying when it comes – is unavailable; it’s all too new for that.”
Information Overload (Quantified And Pondered)
“More data has been created and stored since the turn of the millennium than in the entire history of humanity. Metaphors for information overload tend to fall into two categories: those that suggest addiction or lack of self-control, such as infomania, datamania, infobesity, databesity, dataholism, infostress, dataddiction, infovorism, datadithering, data dread; and those that suggest natural disaster, such as datanami, datageddon, dataclypse, data deluge, data smog, infoglut, information saturation, data swamp, drowning in data.”
Why I Write (Or Not)
“I no longer regret writing, or the life I have made along the way. I’ve learned too much and come too far, and I am in pursuit of an art form. It took a long time, and a lot of work, to get to this point, and I will never find an end to it. I have a problem that can keep me busy for the rest of my life. I have something to look forward to.”
University Philosophy Departments Are Overwhelmingly Male. Should We Care?
“What is the explanation for this peculiarity, and should it be a matter of concern? These two questions are interlinked. How far philosophy’s gender imbalance is bad depends on its causes. If it were the result of simple discrimination against women, for instance, then it would not only be unjust, but it would also be preventing some of the best-suited people from working as philosophers. But it is not obvious that discrimination is the right explanation, and it should not be taken for granted that any other causes for the imbalance would be similarly unacceptable.”
Charlie Hebdo Will Be Publishing No More Cartoons Of Muhammad
Editor Laurent Sourisseau: “We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever one wants, … [but] the mistakes you could blame Islam for can be found in other religions. … We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature.”
Turnaround Begins: Atlanta Symphony Posts Surplus After 11 Years Of Deficits
A spokesman for the Woodruff Arts Center, the ASO’s parent organization, “said early numbers show revenues exceeding expenses by a ‘solid six figures.’ ASO musicians, who went nine weeks without pay during the lockout [that began the season], will share 22 percent of the surplus.”
Soviet Hippies And The Test To Become A Berlin-Wall Border Guard: A Museum To Cold War-Era East Germany – In Los Angeles
“The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War was founded by Justinian Jampol, an Oxford-educated scholar from Los Angeles who channeled his youthful obsession with Cold War iconography into a DIY passion project that now holds over 100,000 items in its collection.” (audio)
When Theatre Folk Strike Back At Mean Old Critics
Douglas Gordon taking an axe to the wall of a theatre after bad reviews of his new production is but one tiny example. Critic Michael Billington offers some more – including Steven Berkoff’s notorious death threat.
Sex Workers Use Theatre To Campaign For Their Rights And Safety In Malawi
“Through theatre, the women in the group tell their stories to the people who need to hear them most: police officers, brothel owners, clients, men. The audience gathers in a circle and, in the midst of them, the women act out a scenario where they have been abused or mistreated. They then invite their audience to suggest how the story could have played out differently.”
Why Is Der Spiegel Calling Berlin’s Museums ‘Haphazard And Uninspired’?
“Few other places are in possession of so many treasures that are so poorly exhibited as Berlin. It’s as though cultural institutions here go out of their way to keep people from visiting.”
One Opera Company’s Transition To Digital Engagement
“We’re in a culture right now of sharing your experience. It all harkens back to the first point, in 2007, when two things happened simultaneously: Apple announced its first iPhone, which literally put a computer into every person’s hands, and Facebook came out of its university setting to become public, so that you could find out for the first time, on a 24/7 basis, what your colleagues, friends, neighbors, and family members were up to, and get their input on what they were doing with their leisure time.”
Rethinking The BBC – What Should It Become?
“This is a consultation that is very much about the BBC’s place in the broadcasting and media market. To what extent should the BBC, which has expanded enormously over the last 20 years, stay as it is?”
UK Education Secretary Walks Back Comments About Arts Education
During an event hosted by the Creative Industries Federation, Morgan said that the speech she made in November – which drew fierce criticism from the cultural sector – was intended to encourage pupils to study science, technology, engineering and maths, rather than discourage them from the arts.
How Do You Get More Dance In Rural Areas? Here’s One Plan
“The Rural Touring Dance Initiative, a three-year project, has been launched by the National Rural Touring Forum and seeks to address an under-representation of dance in rural areas. A report by Arts Council England in March found just 2% of national portfolio dance companies toured to rural regions in 2012 and 2013.”
How A Great Editor Can Have A Profound Impact On A Great Author’s Work
Contrary to the myth that authors work best in lonely isolation, the truth is that editors or close advisers have often quietly shaped great books. The 20th century brought the rise of the professional, interventionist editor.
Salzburg Festival Makes Big Cuts In Budget, Performances
After an eight-percent budget cut down to 60 million euros ($65.2 million, £41.8 million), the 95th edition will feature only 188 performances compared with 270 last year.
Wow – Did The Emmys Suddenly Become Relevant Again?
“The full list of Emmy nominations is very long. As always, the snubs are bizarre – what about HBO’s The Leftovers? But what’s truly bizarre is that the list looks almost up-to-date with the vast amount of great TV, and legitimate.”
Think You Can Train Your Brain Into A Better Memory? (Then Read This)
One writer tries all of the new tricks and tips and advice on how to improve her memory. Did she get better? Of course. But not necessarily at remembering things.
How This Year’s Emmy Nominations Reflect (Or Don’t) The New TV Landscape
“It’s a curious situation—though the Emmys should be commended for acknowledging the wide landscape of quality TV available online, the awards seem to have lost interest in the kind of primetime network dramas that would have been mainstays in the 1980s and ’90s.”
Venice Mayor Bans Children’s Books With Same-Sex Families; Italian Authors Say ‘Then Ban Us, Too’
Luigi Brugnano said, “At home parents can be called Dad One and Dad Two, but I have to think about the majority of families where there is a mother and a father.” 263 writers responded, “Kindly ban our books as well. We don’t want to stay in a city where the books of others are banned.”
David Hockney, Back In L.A.
“It used to be you couldn’t be gay. Now you can be gay but you can’t smoke. There’s always something.”
What Marcelo Gomes Fears About Choreographing
“When you’re choreographing you have to be able to try things out, and to fail, and the fear is always that I’m putting my reputation as a dancer at risk. But now that I’ve started, I can’t hold myself back.”
Emmy Nominations Open Up – And Neglect The Networks
“With a handful of rule changes and a general sense of acceptance that Internet-based TV isn’t going anywhere, Thursday’s announced nominees included acclaimed niche shows like Amazon’s Transparent and Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, while creaky ratings-winners like The Big Bang Theory fell off the map. This year’s Emmy nominees embraced progress by recognizing TV’s ever-growing landscape, but at the cost of major recognition for network television’s newfound focus on diversity.”
Added By Popular Demand! Santa Fe Schedules Extra Performance Of Jennifer Higdon’s New Opera
Cold Mountain doesn’t open for another two weeks, and four of the originally planned five performances are already sold out.
The Most Parodied Poem In America Becomes A Twitter Meme
“William Carlos Williams: brilliant modernist, producer of snackable content, Twitter visionary before his time. Gah. Forgive me.”