“Having entered the four-year period aged twenty-seven as a promising if uncommercial newcomer backed by obscure experimental presses, he will exit it at thirty transformed into a literary lion and international celebrity.”
Did A Violin Teach In Texas Just Break Elgar’s Enigma?
“So what is that enigmatic theme that supposedly runs through the entire work but is never played? Elgar, who died in 1934, never said. It has been understood to be a well-known melody that would harmonize with the music if played along with it. For decades, musicologists, cryptologists and music lovers have offered up innumerable solutions for the phantom melody.”
How Psychologists Can Tell If A Defendant Is Faking Insanity
“Welcome to the strange science of malingering, a fancy word for faking illness in order to gain an advantage of some kind. It’s an area of psychological study that highlights the counterintuitive orderliness of insanity and also reveals that many people have no idea what it’s like to have a genuine mental disorder.”
You Think ‘Alternative Facts’ Are Like Science Fiction? Ursula Le Guin Would Like A Word With You
In a letter to her local paper, she writes, “We call it fiction because it isn’t fact. … The test of a fact is that it simply is so – it has no ‘alternative.’ The sun rises in the east. To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so as fact (or ‘alternative fact’) is a lie.”
Classical Composers Aren’t Exactly Celebrities In America – So How Did Philip Glass Become A Household Name?
Steve Reich and John Adams have been more innovative; Michael Nyman writes Hollywood film scores, too. But Glass is the one who gets name-checked in Gilmore Girls and made fun of on The Simpsons and South Park. Why is this? Dan Ruccia has an explanation. (It’s not because of Cousin Ira.)
Verona’s Ancient Roman Amphitheatre To Get Retractable Roof
A winner has been chosen from among 87 designs submitted for roofing the Arena di Verona, which dates back to 30 AD and is still regularly used for concerts and other events, as well as for one of the world’s most famous (and financially precarious) opera festivals.
Vera Lynn Releases A New Album… At Age 100
“The singer is known as the forces’ sweetheart for entertaining troops during World War Two to boost morale. Dame Vera – 100 in March – currently holds the record for being the oldest living artist to get a top 20 UK album.”
Mississippi Arts Commission Survives Attempt By Republican Legislature To Offload It
“Yesterday, two bills intended to fold the duties of the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) into the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) died in both the Senate and House Appropriations Committees due to the fact that they were not brought up by either chairman. January 31 was the deadline for bills to come out of committee.”
Culture-Maker Facebook Now Has 1.8 Billion Users, Made $10 Billion In 2016
“Equally impressive are Facebook’s usage numbers: The social network attracted 1.23 billion daily active users in December on average, including 1.15 billion mobile daily actives, with the latter being up 23% year-over-year. And 1.74 billion of Facebook’s 1.86 billion monthly active users were on mobile devices for at least some of their visits.”
Pakistan Lifts Its Ban On Indian Films
“The ban was introduced in September 2016, as a response to the escalation of cross-border tensions between Pakistan and India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. … Indian films account for around 70% of Pakistan’s box office, something the Ministry of Information statement seemed to acknowledge, saying that lifting the ban would help the ‘revival of the Pakistani film industry’.”
Two Syrian Refugee Children Who Play In The San Diego Youth Symphony Talk About Music And Life In America
“Carla Chehadeh, 17, remembers a teacher at her school who was shot and killed in an attack and Christine Chehadeh, 12, recalls huddling in a hallway during a large bomb blast. While they lived in Damascus, the sisters took cello and violin lessons, in part because their parents always regretted never learning themselves.”
‘Rococo And Flemish Influences’ – An Art Critic Has A Go At Beyoncé’s Pregnancy Pic
Anna Furman: “An appealing remix of rococo excesses, Flemish portraiture and Latin American funerary symbols.”
Getting Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto Back To What Tchaikovsky Really Wrote
“What we commonly hear is an overly ostentatious misrepresentation, tarted up after Tchaikovsky’s death” by a former student who had also studied with Liszt. Pianist Kirill Gerstein has gone back to the composer’s own conducting score and other sources to create a cleaner edition. “It’s still very much the Tchaikovsky concerto we love,” Gerstein says, “but it perhaps has a different facial expression than we are used to.” (includes sound clips)
Kazakhstan Bids To Become A Real Player In Ballet World
The futuristic new capital of the energy-rich Central Asian republic has two fully professional ballet theaters, and talented dancers no longer need to go to Russia or the West to make a career.
Author Bharati Mukherjee, 76, Pioneer Of India’s Literary Diaspora
She was known for depicting, in books like The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine, the lives of young women from traditional societies as they navigate new lives in America. She’s also remembered for a stinging essay about her decision to leave Canada after 14 years for the United States.
For The First Time Since 2008 Book Seller Waterstone’s Makes A Profit
“The bookseller made a £9.8m pretax profit in the year to 30 April 2016. The previous year is made a £4.5m loss. Bought from HMV by the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut in 2011 for £53m, Waterstones has shrugged off the rise of ebooks and Amazon to record a 4.3% increase in sales to £409m. Sales growth has continued in the past year, with a 4.7% rise over Christmas.”
Can A New App Finally Track Media Ratings Across All Platforms? (How’s That For Sexy?)
“It does so with an integrated app that passively collects audio fingerprints for all programming, both live and playback. Every single program automatically has an audio fingerprint, which is a condensed digital summary generated from an audio signal. The app simply matches it to a database that ingests all programming content across networks and streaming channels. The San Francisco startup, which launched in September 2015, depends on a diverse panel of users who run the app in the background of mobile devices, TVs, or laptops. The app offers brand-new insight into consumer behavior.”
This Year Netflix Tried To Take Over Sundance
“At this year’s festival, things were different from the word go. Netflix wasn’t just in Park City to buy: It was making a full show of force, starting with the first movie in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. That film was I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, the writing and directing debut of actor Macon Blair; Blair had pitched Netflix on the concept at Sundance 2016, and they financed the movie from the ground up.”
Report: Top Women Hollywood Directors Make Few Films
“According to an analysis of race, gender, age, and equity across 1,000 films released between 2007 and 2016, the majority of women spearheading these productions are from a narrow pipeline, and they rarely released more than one film in the nine years analyzed.”