“Smart Thinking” Books – Self-Help For Smart People?
“It has been called intelligent self-help, but since most potential readers would not appreciate the implied association with the dumber varieties, “smart thinking” has a certain advantage.”
Is The London Review Of Books The World’s Best Literary Magazine?
“This is, in many respects, a key part of the LRB’s ethos: it provides a space in which intelligent people can think differently; in which discomfiting thoughts can be voiced and provoking arguments can be aired with enough room to breathe.”
Bloomberg News Quits Arts Coverage
“It is especially inexplicable that Bloomberg News would ignore arts and design when award-winning and insightful architecture and design in its own facilities and terminals has abetted the company’s success. Contemporary art is widely found in the Bloomberg workplace.”
Devastating: The World Heritage Sites That Will Be Lost To Climate Change
“A new study released last week emphasizes the severity of this impact on culture: a whole fifth of the 720 listed UNESCO World Heritage Sites could be lost.”
The Uphill Battle To Build A Performing Arts Center At The World Trade Center
“To succeed, it will need to assemble a high-octane board, win over a thusfar noncommittal mayor and explain why the project is vital to New York at a time when a handful of similar theater spaces have opened in recent years, cultural leaders and arts-management experts said.”
Why We Need To Reinvent The Ways We Write Online
“The way media is changing isn’t entirely positive when it comes to creating a more informed citizenry. Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?”
The Onion Breaks The Story: National Endowment For The Arts To Award $80 Million For Talentless Hacks
“The independent federal agency said it intends to provide the nation’s exceptionally unskilled and deluded artists with cash grants ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 in order to sway them from continuing with their derivative and atrocious work, thereby significantly bolstering the overall quality of art in the United States.”
The World’s Rarest Jazz 78s Were Found Here
“In the 1940s, the Jazz Record Center became the default clubhouse for a cabal of distinctive gentlemen: exiles, recluses, characters so outsize in their eccentricities that they felt invented, except better. Here there was not a sense—as with the archetypal Outsider—that a choice had been made. Here, the earliest collectors of 78 rpm records found each other.”
Ukraine’s Most-Influential Poet Is Beaten
“It may sound like an old-fashioned ‘poet stands up to tyranny’ story, like something out of ‘Les Miz’—‘Can you hear the people sing?’—but it’s really kind of like that.”
The Ignorance Economy (It’s Thriving In The Age Of Information)
“The myth of the ‘information society’ is that we’re drowning in knowledge. But it’s easier to propagate ignorance.” That’s especially so when issues are so complicated that it’s easier to present them as the topics for discussion in which both sides are granted equal time.
David Carr: The Quality Of TV Has Gotten So Good It’s Edging Out Other Art Forms
“The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process.”
Where Are The Real Scholars Of Technology? (It Matters Because The World Is Changing)
“Technology comforts, surrounds, and confounds us. When we argue about MOOCs, hydraulic fracturing, NSA surveillance, or drone warfare, we’re arguing about technology. Unfortunately, the conversation is impoverished by the absence of a robust cadre of scholars who can engage with and critique the role of technology in society.”
Michelangelo’s David Carrying A Rifle? Not If Italy Can Help It
Of course it’s in an American advertisement. “A philosopher and the city’s councillor for culture, Sergio Givone, claimed in newspaper La Repubblica the depiction was ‘a real abuse’. ‘It is an act of violence towards the sculpture; like taking a hammer to it and perhaps, actually, even worse,’ he said.”
How Did The Detroit Symphony Orchestra Reinvent Itself?
Partly by doing outreach at places like Ikea. Yes, Ikea flash mob Beethoven 9.
Why China Will Partner With Disney
“While the Chinese film market is booming – box office was $3.6 billion last year and is expected to reach $4.6 billion in 2014 – there is still a feeling among domestic filmmakers that scripts need to improve, production needs to become more professional and the industry generally needs to learn from the Hollywood model.”
What Derek Jarman Meant To The Stage, Not Just The Screen
“Ken Russell – about to direct Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera Taverner – tried to tempt him into designing the Royal Opera House production. Jarman got as far as suggesting lighting the auditorium blue instead of blusher pink, costuming the orchestra, and hanging dead cattle up with the chandelier. … Ralph Koltai got the job instead.”
If Dance Gets Back Into UK Schools, Will Kids Learn To Express Their Feelings More Clearly?
The ballerina who wants to bring dance lessons into the schools: “I have two young daughters and they’re growing up with such a facility for communicating online. It’s amazing the way they can communicate in so many different ways, but then they forget to communicate with their bodies.”
Movie Moguls Say They’d Really *Like* To Film In California, But …
Show them the money. Harvey Weinstein: “There’s no reason for us not to shoot here, except when you do the numbers here and when you do the numbers in New Orleans, it is much more attractive financially.”
What’s The Problem With Meryl Streep?
“Streep isn’t interested in inhabiting a character as much as presenting her latest incarnation in the manner of a student presenting the flawlessly constructed jigamajoo she’s rigged up for the Science Fair, waiting for the ribbons to be pinned to her chest. After eight Golden Globes, three Oscars, and 46 nominations between the two ceremonies, it’s working.”
Another Free Streaming Music Service, This One From Samsung
It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Hey Classical Musicians, You Need To Learn Folk Music
“Even teachers who know very little about traditional music could assign interesting fiddle tunes to their students as a break between scales and etudes. It would be a moment in the middle of a practice session to reflect on just how much musical tradition exists in America. It would be a moment to recognize that most, if not all music comes, in some way, from folk traditions.”
London’s A City In Thrall To Money And Greed
“Recently a former biscuit factory in Bermondsey that was home to 400 artists was sold to convert it into 800 high-end flats. The colour in the capital that comes from the energy and creativity of artists, among others, is drained.”
Ned O’Gorman Wanted To Give Kids ‘Literature, Latin, And Love’
“‘I was merely a fool poet,’ he said, ‘with nothing but poetry in his bag, hoping the energy and joy that brought poems from chaos would carry me to the children.’ The school, the Children’s Storefront, has flourished in three adjoining townhouses on East 129th Street, becoming a fully accredited, tuition-free school with a $4 million budget and a student body of about 170 children, from prekindergarten through eighth grade.”
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How Did A Famous Novelist Get Sucked Into A Psychopath’s Lies And Life?
Walter Kirn: “Here’s the problem: I’d met rich eccentrics at Princeton and Oxford. If I’d never met one, I probably would have seen through him — but because I’d met them and they were so crazy, he just seemed like another crazy one of them.”
Paris, Before It Was Destroyed/Saved By Gentrification
“An architecturally harmonious capital rose from the rubble, a city of spectacle, built for a new, modern economy, but homogeneous and no longer welcoming to many of the poor souls who had helped make the place run and had always been deep in its cultural lifeblood.”
Loving Good Books Doesn’t Make You A Good Person
“Ted Kaczynski was not improved by his obsession with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, nor Timothy McVeigh by his fascination with The Turner Diaries. Mark David Chapman was not healed by his love of The Catcher in the Rye. The disturbed reader—or, in my case, the merely immature reader—won’t always be ennobled simply by cracking open a great book.”
You Might Want To Sit Down: The Arts Aren’t Expanding Access To Jobs In The Arts
Um … “Barriers to the industry include the requirement for high-level qualifications and the preference of employers to use unpaid workers, the report says. Another obstacle is the need for industry newcomers to have an informal network of ‘insiders’ within the sector before they can secure a job.”
Internet Trolls’ Latest Target: Amazon Book Reviews
“Nobody who’s ever been online would be surprised that comments can get nasty. But book reviews are new ground for this fight. Reviews are one of the only places where saying whether you don’t like the thing you’re discussing is kind of the point.”
Does It Matter If You Can’t Remember Your 20s While You’re Writing Your Famous-Artist Memoir?
“Hirst will be neither the first author nor the last to invent portions of his memoirs. In fact, it’s pretty unfair to expect to anyone to really remember their own life particularly accurately, without going around scribbling on their body like Guy Pearce in Memento.”
The Perfect Performance (One That The Actor Can’t Remember)
“I had this feeling of complete ecstasy,” actor Ed Harris says. “It’s probably the most high I’ve been ever, in any way.”
Is Stonehenge One (Really Big) Carillon?
“A number of rocks, when struck, made ‘distinctive (if muted) sounds.’ They judged that enough made sounds such that once, they all would have rung, and furthermore saw marks on the rocks that might—upon further forensic testing—prove to be strike marks.”
Why We Should Listen More To This Bach (His Name Is Carl)
“Bach’s restless, radical new style fits within history — with the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War, the shifting of nations and the Enlightenment, which encouraged individualism.”
What Happened To The Memorials For The Fall Of The Berlin Wall?
“The 25th anniversary the fall of the Berlin Wall is approaching this autumn, and the anniversary is set to be marked by the unveiling of two major memorials in central Leipzig and Berlin. But their ceremonial inauguration is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future — there are just too many problems with the schedules and the budgets of both.”
Wrangling Insects In The Service Of Art
“Any fool could put a bucket of cockroaches on a table. But it takes somebody knowledgeable to know how to make them act for a camera.”
Will This Guy (Or Anyone) Save The Music Business?
“He is putting songs on smartphones in Africa, reviving moribund American record labels and making Lorde into a Grammy-winning global sensation. Above all, he wants to forge new partnerships with his industry’s erstwhile adversaries — the technology firms that have upended the way people get their music.”