How James Kelly managed both to forge his boss’s work and to swipe some originals.
China Delays Release Of Latest “Hunger Games” Film – To Protect Domestic Industry
“The China release date for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 has been pushed back until January 2015, sources in Beijing said, as film authorities try to balance domestic and foreign box office totals before the year end.”
23 Cool Maps And Charts About Language
Linguistic family trees; languages maps of China, India, and Ukraine; how well various EU nationals can converse in English; the most common second language in each U.S. state; a graphic timeline of the history of the English language; a graph charting the rise and fall of the semicolon … a treasure trove for language and graphics geeks.
To Maintain Your Brain, Exercise It, Right? (But Here’s What The Studies Say…)
“In healthy older adults, computer-based brain exercises have limited benefits, and then only when supervised by a trainer once to three times a week. And despite what Lumosity and BrainHQ will tell you, doing the training at home had no effect at all, at least in the short term.”
How Light Restored The Color In Rothko Paintings
“A team from Harvard and the MIT Media Lab realised that light could be used to restore the appearance of the lost colours without touching the canvas. The idea was to illuminate each mural with a pattern of light that would project the missing aspects of the lost colours onto the original canvases, returning them to their original hues without disturbing the paintings’ textures.”
The “Serial” Backlash Has Arrived
Almost any media phenomenon that becomes as popular as fast as this podcast has gets some sort of backlash on the Web. Anna Silman offers us – without judgment (we can provide that) – a guide to the main complaints.
“Serial” Murder Victim’s Brother Gives Us All A Reality Check
The younger brother of Hae Min Lee, the Baltimore high school senior whose 1999 murder, and the subsequent criminal trial, are the subject of the popular podcast, took to Reddit to remind the rest of us that it really isn’t fun to see your family’s most agonizing period become an online obsession. (He does, however, have a bit of praise for reporter Sarah Koenig.)
Dylan Thomas, The Last Rock-Star Poet
“Marshall McLuhan hadn’t yet given us the formula, but if Dylan Thomas was the medium, poetry was the message. Already a radio favorite in Britain, he blazed his reputation across 1950s America with a sequence of Led Zeppelin–esque reading tours, multicity road shows in which the dying throb of Romanticism met the incoming crackle of mass communication.”
And The Oxford Dictionaries’ 2014 Word of The Year Is …
… Well, you’ll just have to click to find out, but there’s a hint in the photo at left. (includes runners-up)
The Life Of A Modern-Day Dungeon Master
That’s as in Dungeons and Dragons, not … anything else. Yes, there are still D&D Dungeonmasters, and they’re by no means all geeky white boys anymore. (This one’s an Asian-American woman.)
How Data Is Revolutionizing Design
“More than ever, highly technical design is becoming more data-driven, faster, and smarter. As I learned at the Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Experience Forum in Las Vegas this week, engineers are increasingly using virtual test benches, new data sources, advanced computer simulations, and extremely sophisticated 3D modeling software to build much better mousetraps.”
Longtime LA Times Critic Charles Champlin, 88
“During his 26 years at The Times, Champlin served as the paper’s principal film critic from 1967 through 1980. He then shifted to book reviewing and, with his “Critic at Large” column, offered a more general overview of the arts. He retired in 1991 but continued to contribute to The Times’ daily and Sunday Calendar sections and wrote two books despite becoming legally blind from age-related macular degeneration in 1999.”
The Problem With How Arts Organizations Collect Data
“In many cases, arts organizations’ collection of data has been driven by the need to comply with funders’ reporting requirements rather than by a desire to collect information that could improve their future decision making. While the databases that have been generated through this process provide rich sources of information, it is not always clear what that information is good for, or how individual organizations can benefit from it.”
Crystal Bridges’ First President Leaves To Lead George Lucas’s Planned Museum In Chicago
“[Don] Bacigalupi has been named the founding president of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, to be built in Chicago, with a proposed opening date in 2018. The $700 million museum is funded by filmmaker George Lucas, who created Star Wars.”
The Art World Has Gotten Entirely Too Uptight, Says Jerry Saltz
“Flexibility is life, but lately I keep thinking that the art world has gotten a lot less flexible, and the freedom that I’ve always thought of as completely foundational – freedom to let our freak flags fly and express ourselves, even bizarrely – has constricted considerably. … Or maybe it’s me. Because, to be fair, a lot of this tempestuousness has been happening around moi.”
Why We Sometimes Laugh At Painful Events Or Want To Smack Adorable Babies (It’s Called Maintaining Emotional Homeostasis)
“If you get into a very high or very low emotion that you’re almost to the point of being overwhelmed, you become incapacitated so you can’t function well. Emotional homeostasis is important for people so they can be in control of their cognitive, social, and psychological functions.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.17.14
The Henry Mollicone underground operas
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2014-11-17
Breaking News: Don Bacigalupi Leaving Crystal Bridges
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2014-11-17
Scarlett fever
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2014-11-17
Creating Worlds, Including Liturgical Ones
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2014-11-17
To Each Her Own With Others
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2014-11-17
Two Big Moves: Bacigalupi to Lucas Museum; Ravenal to deCordova Museum
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2014-11-17
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Playwrights Get A New Venue – The UK’s Guardian Newspaper, Online
The plays “cover topics such as music, fashion, politics, sport and education and are all around five minutes long.”
Need To Make A Documentary About Banksy? Just Use The Footage That’s Already Online
“Every time somebody uses a hashtag, they’re not only directing people’s attention to something, they’re also creating this massive online archive.”
New Grand(iose) Plan: From The Ashes Of A West Side Pier, A Private Park/Performance Island On The Hudson
“The project also raises thorny questions about private control over public spaces, the secretive planning process behind it and the potential competition between it and other new cultural institutions hoping to make their mark on the city.”
He Really Was Funny Once (Adam Gopnik On Bob Hope)
“When I was a teen-ager, I sort of hated Bob Hope. All of us did. … There he was, year after year, on those post-Christmas U.S.O. specials, with shrieking starlets and shirtless soldiers, swinging his golf club like a swagger stick. … America, however, is the country of the eternal appeals court, where judgment, once it has worked its way through the system, has to work its way through it all over again.”