“On March 13, author Teju Cole published ‘A Piece Of The Wall’ entirely on Twitter, a first-of-its-kind essay on Arizona and immigration comprised of approximately 250 tweets that were tweeted out over the span of seven hours.” In a Q-&-A, Cole explains what he was up to and how he pulled it off.
Archives for March 18, 2014
America’s First Professional Songwriter, Stephen Foster (We’re Still Under His Shadow)
“Historians now credit him with having pretty much invented the American pop song in its purest form: the bastard stepchild of the parlor song and the minstrel song, of the European and African strains of American music.” (And that child is very much a bastard – ever heard the second verse of “Oh, Susannah”? Yikes.)
The Archdiocese of New York Gets Into Downtown Theater
This spring in Manhattan’s Noho neighborhood, the Catholic archdiocese will open a two-theater, four-studio complex named after Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Says the Sheen Center’s director, “We had been thinking that we wanted a place to showcase Christian humanism – the true, the good and the beautiful.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Last of the Beats, to Publish His Travel Journals
The poet, publisher, and co-founder of the legendary City Lights bookstore, “at 94 one of the last living links to the Beat generation, has sold his travel journals to Liveright Publishing, a division of W.W. Norton, which plans to publish them in September 2015.”
Pat Oliphant, Still Drawing Sharp Political Satire at Age 78
“For nearly 60 years, Mr. Oliphant has been skewering politicians, statesmen and other hapless souls in cartoons that have won him virtually every award in his field, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 while he was still in his early 30s – and sometimes condemnation in equal measure.”
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Names Jeremy Denk Next Artistic Partner
Beginning this fall, the pianist and MacArthur Fellow, who just won the 2014 Avery Fisher Prize, “will work with the SPCO for three years on performances, collaborations with vocal artists, new commissions by American composers and a North American tour.”
How Did Maria Kochetkova Rise to the Top in Ballet? Sheer Obsession
“Everyone who knows [her] remarks on her relentless drive. ‘She will try to get into the building on weekends and holidays,’ says Helgi Tomasson, SFB’s artistic director. ‘It’s all-consuming to her. I sometimes say, ‘Go home. Take a day off.’ But that’s not her.'”
This Man Predicted the Multiverse in the 13th Century
“When physicists translated a 13th-century Latin text into modern equations, they discovered that the English theologian who wrote it had unwittingly predicted the idea of the multiverse in 1225. While the work probably won’t advance current models, it does show that some of the philosophical conundrums posed by cosmology are surprisingly pervasive.”
March Madness Comes to Scrabble
Sports journalist Stefan Fatsis reports on Hasbro’s public tournament – complete with a Sweet-16 bracket – to pick a new word to be added to the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.