What’s The Point? Speedreading App Makes You Faster But Who Cares If You Don’t Understand What You Rea?
“While it’s irresistibly alluring to feel as though you’ve suddenly stumbled on an ultimate life hack that enables you to consume knowledge at the pace of a legendary savant, it also makes you feel a bit like an epileptic robot.”
What Happened To The Theatres Of Shakespeare’s Time?
“William Shakespeare would be amazed at what we can learn about his world all these centuries later, just by walking around London for three or four hours and taking careful note.”
Taking The Kafkaesque Out Of Kafka
Whoever utters “Kafkaesque” has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.
When (If) Civilization Is Destroyed, What Do We Want To Leave Behind?
“In the event that life as we know it is truly upended, the survivors will have to rebuild our civilization. Given everything humanity has learned over the past hundred thousand years, what information should we leave them?”
Has Philosophy Lost Its Way?
“I’ve imagined Plato shuddering at a certain conception of the field he helped to shape. Would he likewise shudder at having been left so far behind by that field?”
ATT To Jump Into Crowded Netflix Streaming Territory
“The move comes amid rapid growth in online video services. AT&T, a telecoms giant, already offers TV content through its U-Verse service, which competes with more traditional cable TV providers. With online video, though, it could attract customers of Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and other services — including people who’ve stopped paying for traditional broadcast, cable or satellite TV.”
Liverpool Arts Center Replaces Paid Staff With Volunteers
“Those affected were all really upset. They were very angry. The advertising for the volunteers says they will pay travel expenses and people will get work experience out of it.”
How I Review Music (One Critic’s Roadmap)
“Admittedly, no one actually bestowed upon me the ability to be a new music critic. Such is the greatness of the internet: anyone can hang out a shingle.”
Happy 450th Birthday Shakespeare (Here’s How He Became So Famous)
“It is only Shakespeare whose language and characters have taken on a life of their own, enabling his work constantly to accommodate itself to the new. There is a quotation for every occasion, a character parallel for every figure in public life.”
Not Your Imagination – Movie Quality Depends On What Time Of Year It’s Released (Here’s The Data)
“In summation: January through April movies are terrible; summer movies are better; autumn movies are better than January movies but worse than summer movies; and holiday season movies are best of all.”
The Nashville Symphony Seems To Be Recovering Slowly But Steadily
“The Nashville Symphony has paid off $2.5 million of its restructured $25.3 million debt. … However, with $22.8 million of debt on its books and labor negotiations looming with musicians, there’s still work to be done, including reaching its fundraising goal.”
We Found Shakespeare’s Personal Dictionary on eBay!, Say Book Dealers
“For more than half a century, many scholars have believed that Shakespeare consulted a 1580 dictionary published in London called An Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie.” Now a pair of antiquarians claim they’ve found that very volume, complete with Shakespeare’s own handwritten notes. Naturally, some scholars disagree. Robinson Meyer runs down the arguments for and against.
There’s a Lost Generation of ’90s Indie Filmmakers
Richard Brody: “The paradox of independent filmmaking is that it often replicates, on a low budget and a small scale, the commercial mainstream’s production process and approach to acting. On the one hand, that’s why many independent filmmakers of that time turned out to be Hollywood-ready when things worked out right. On the other, that’s why, for some, it was tough to come up with a cinematic Plan B when they didn’t.”
Houston Symphony Musicians Get a Raise
“The symphony’s musicians will get a 2.85 percent annual raise under terms of the four-year deal, which will take their annual salary from $86,840 today to $97,240 during the 2017-18 season.”
Thomas Piketty’s Economic Argument Applies To Art, Too (And How)
“The French economist’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a historic survey of wealth concentration that has quickly become a go-to text for the gathering debate on income inequality. … It is worth considering how the unprecedented amounts of money the wealthy have recently been spending on trophy artworks might be a natural extension of his argument.”
How to Forge a Masterpiece (It’s in the Court Documents)
“The indictment reads in places like a forger’s manual, laying out the materials needed to forge masterpieces and how to create a fraudulent history of a painting’s creation, ownership, custody and location, known as its provenance.”
The Damien Hirst Forgery Trial: A Juror Speaks
“[Such trials] are fairly banal legal processes, cases settled by a jury of peers that considers the facts and comes to a conclusion. But these human beings also become, for a period of a few hours, days, or weeks, endowed with a unique power and perspective: critics with the force of law.” Hyperallergic offers a Q&A with a member of the panel that convicted a Florida pastor of selling fake Hirsts.
Artist Accuses Turkish Government of Deliberately Dumbing Down Populace
Ali Kazma: “Statistically, educated Turks do not vote for AKP … It seems like the interest of AKP lies in mobilizing the regressive parts of the society financially upwards while maintaining their low education levels, gender inequality and intellectual curiosity.”
‘He Was The Greatest Of Us All’: Salman Rushdie on Gabriel García Márquez
“I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it – not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous ‘wonder tales’ of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism.”
Torvill and Dean: How We Made ‘Boléro’
The legendary ice dancers recount how they created the program that won then the gold medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics – and that remains, 30 years later, one of the most storied performances in the history of the discipline. (Surprise: the Ravel piece was considered a radical choice back then.)
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NY Times Architecture Critic Dives Into Transit Policy: Build A Brooklyn-Queens Streetcar!
Michael Kimmelman: “So while Mayor Bill de Blasio continues to refine his agenda, including that promise of 200,000 units of affordable housing, he might consider a streetcar connecting Red Hook to Astoria. … I’m not talking Ye Olde Trolley. This is transit for New Yorkers who can’t wait another half-century for the next subway station.”
Andrei Konchalovsky, Director and Master Aphorist
Says the man who went from co-scripting Andrei Rublev to making the Oscar-nominated Runaway Train to getting fired from Tango & Cash: “Freedom is not a guarantee of good art. The best art comes in the war or the plague.” “[Art] can help politics when politics are ready to be changed. Not before.” “Opera is much closer to circus than to cinema.” “Tango & Cash, like every real Hollywood film, is a film for people who cannot read.”
The Real-Life Murder Case That Shakespeare (May Have) Helped Dramatise
The darkly comic Arden of Faversham is (closely) based on an actual case: the 1551 murder of a wealthy provincial businessman by his wife and her lover.
Can the Relics of the 1964 World’s Fair Be Saved? Should They Be?
“You can see them from at least three highways in Queens, rising up like futuristic beacons: a giant metal circle on top of 16 concrete pillars and three towers stretching skyward, topped by flying saucer roofs. They look like heralds of a new space age. But they were built for the 1964 World’s Fair, as part of the New York State Pavilion.”
$50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize Goes To Claudia Rankine
She said of the award, “Often a division is made between politics and poetry, and I like to think this is a moment when the intersection is recognized.”